BJ  1521  . F6  1923 
Fosdick,  Harry  Emerson,  187 
-1969. 

Twelve  tests  of  character 


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Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/details/twelvetestsofcha00fosd_1 


'Twelve 

Tests  of  Characler 


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1/ 


Harry  Emerson  Fosdick 


ASSOCIATION  PRESS 

New  York:  347  Madison  Ave. 
1923 


Copyrighted,  1923,  by 
The  International  Committee  of 
Young  Men’s  Christian  Associations 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


Foreword 


These  essays  on  practical  religion  and  right  liv¬ 
ing  were  written  because  the  editor  of  the  Ladies' 
Home  Journal  offered  his  large  circle  of  readers  as 
an  audience.  The  articles  are  now  printed  as  a  book 
with  no  attempt  to  change  their  content  or  style. 
They  doubtless  exhibit  alike  the  liberties  and  the 
restraints  which  publication  in  a  popular  magazine 
suggests.  Their  serial  nature  also  is  occasionally 
indicated  as  in  the  eleventh  article,  which  appeared 
in  November  and  which  commemorates  Thanks¬ 
giving  Day.  Except  as  I  have  retained  in  the  book 
the  original  form  of  articles  which  editorial  neces¬ 
sity  compressed  when  they  were  published  in  the 
Journal,  I  have  left  the  essays  practically  as  they 
first  were  printed. 

The  papers  are  an  endeavor  to  stress  some  funda¬ 
mental  tests  of  character  which  our  new  generation 
is  tempted  to  forget.  With  many  overhead  schemes 
for  the  world’s  salvation,  everything  rests  back  on 
integrity  and  driving  power  in  personal  character. 


FOREWORD 


vi 

“You  cannot  carve  rotten  wood,”  says  a  Chinese 
proverb.  Nor  can  you  carve  decrepit  and  decayed 
character  into  any  economic  system  or  scheme  of 
government  that  will  work  happiness  for  men.  It 
is  an  old  emphasis,  but  it  is  indispensable,  and  just 
now  we  may  well  get  back  to  it. 


New  York , 
October  1 ,  1923 . 


Harry  Emerson  Fosdick. 


Contents 


PAGE 

First  Things  First .  1 

Long  Ropes  and  Strong  Stakes . 18 

A  High  Opinion  of  Oneself . 35 

Seeing  the  Invisible . 53 

The  Privilege  of  Living . 71 

Minding  One’s  Own  Business . 89 

Obedience . 107 

Above  the  Average . 124 

Harnessing  the  Caveman . 143 

Magnanimity . 162 

Possessing  a  Past  Tense . 180 

The  Power  to  See  It  Through . 199 


First  Things  First 


I 

RECENT  ride  upon  a  Fifth  Avenue  bus 
threatened  to  waste  time.  The  talk  of 
two  women,  however,  whose  conver¬ 
sation  was  too  plainly  audible  to  be 
escaped,  made  it  well  worth  while.  They  were 
bosom  friends,  and  in  an  hour’s  tete-a-tete  they 
gave  a  comprehensive  resume  of  their  characters. 

They  loved  to  play  bridge,  and  they  played  it, 
apparently,  a  good  deal  of  the  time.  They  were 
gambling  at  it.  To  be  sure,  one  of  them  had  had 
some  trouble  with  her  husband,  who,  having  been 
brought  up  a  Presbyterian,  had  scruples  about 
gambling.  “But,”  she  had  said  to  him,  “you  see 
that  we  must  give  up  the  game  if  we  do  not 
gamble.”  So  he  had  come  over  just  recently.  They 
were  all  gambling  now  and  were  happy.  They 
loved  the  theater,  especially  musical  comedies. 
They  loved  to  dance  and  evidently,  when  they  were 
not  playing  bridge,  dancing  was  their  chief  diver- 


2  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


sion.  They  loved  their  automobile  trips,  and  as 
for  dress,  how  shall  a  mere  man  report  their  con¬ 
versation  about  that?  One  listened  to  see  if  any 
other  interest  in  life  would  be  revealed,  but  this  was 
all.  Their  talk  had  struck  bottom. 

These  women  live  in  one  of  the  most  needy  and 
critical  generations  in  history,  when  a  shaken 
civilization  is  striving  desperately  to  get  on  its  feet 
again,  when  there  are  great  enterprises  to  serve, 
great  books  to  read,  great  thoughts  to  think;  and 
yet  their  lives,  like  a  child’s  doll,  are  stuffed  with 
sawdust.  They  represent  in  an  extreme  form  one  of 
the  commonest  failures  in  character — the  crowding 
out  of  things  that  really  matter  by  things  that  do 
not  matter  much.  They  are  absorbingly  busy  with 
trivialities.  They  have  missed  the  primary  duty 
and  privilege  of  life — putting  first  things  first. 

The  basic  facts  about  us  which  make  such  pro¬ 
miscuous  preoccupation  ruinous  is  that  our  life’s 
time  and  our  life’s  energy  are  limited.  We  are  like 
street  cars:  we  can  hold  our  quota  and  no  more; 
when  all  seats  are  taken,  the  standing  room 
absorbed,  and  the  “Car  Full”  sign  put  up  in  front, 
whoever  hails  us  next,  though  he  be  the  most  prom¬ 
inent  citizen  in  the  community,  must  be  passed  by. 

It  never  was  so  easy  to  fail  in  this  particular  way 
as  it  is  today.  There  may  have  been  times  when 
life  was  sluggish  and  folk  could  drift  listlessly 


FIRST  THINGS  FIRST 


3 


through  apathetic  years.  The  Bible  tells  the  story 
of  Methuselah’s  living  over  nine  centuries,  but,  so 
far  as  the  record  shows,  he  never  did  anything  or 
thought  anything  to  make  such  longevity  worth 
while.  If  ever  life  could  be  dragged  out  through 
such  dull  continuance,  that  time  has  gone.  Today 
the  currents  of  life  are  swift  and  stimulating,  the 
demands  of  life  absorbing.  There  are  more  things  to 
do  than  we  ever  shall  get  done;  there  are  more  books 
to  read  than  we  ever  can  look  at;  there  are  more 
avenues  to  enjoyment  than  we  ever  shall  find  time 
to  travel.  Life  appeals  to  us  from  innumerable 
directions,  crying,  “Attend  to  me  here!”  In  conse¬ 
quence,  we  are  continually  tempted  to  dabble.  We 
litter  up  our  lives  with  indiscriminate  preoccupa¬ 
tion.  We  let  first  come  be  first  served,  forgetting 
that  the  finest  things  do  not  crowd.  We  let  the 
loudest  voices  fill  our  ears,  forgetting  that  asses 
bray,  but  gentlemen  speak  low.  Multitudes  of 
people  are  living  not  bad  but  frittered  lives — split, 
scattered,  uncoordinated.  They  are  like  pictures 
into  which  a  would-be  artist  has  put,  in  messy  dis¬ 
array,  everything  that  he  has  chanced  to  see;  like 
music  into  which  has  been  hurled,  helterskelter, 
every  vagrant  melody  that  strayed  into  the  com¬ 
poser’s  mind. 

Preoccupation  is  the  most  common  form  of 
failure. 


4  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


II 

Consider,  for  example,  the  effect  of  preoccupation 
on  our  reading.  Some  time  ago  an  airship  collapsed 
above  Chicago  and  dumped  itself  ruinously  down 
upon  a  public  building.  People  woke  up  at  that, 
to  see  that  new  inventions  like  airplanes  require 
special  regulation.  Now,  the  printing  press  is  a 
comparatively  new  invention.  Five  hundred  years 
ago  there  was  no  such  thing.  And  while  it  is  im¬ 
portant  that  aircraft  should  not  be  allowed  to 
empty  themselves  into  our  households,  it  is  just  as 
important  to  consider  what  the  printing  press  is 
emptying  into  our  heads. 

X  An  entirely  new  set  of  problems  has  arisen  since 
the  printing  press  arrived  and  reading  became  one 
of  the  dominant  influences  of  human  life.  When 
one  considers  how  reading  seeps  in  through  all  the 
cracks  and  crannies  of  our  days,  what  power  there  is 
in  books  to  determine  our  views  of  life,  and  how 
cheaply  these  possibilities  lie  at  every  man’s  hand, 
it  is  plain  that  the  quality  of  a  man’s  reading  is  one 
of  his  foremost  responsibilities. 

It  is  plain,  too,  that  while  a  few  people  delib¬ 
erately  read  perversive  books,  most  of  us  miss  the 
best  books,  not  because  we  choose  the  bad  but 
because  we  litter  up  our  minds  with  casual  trash. 
We  stop  to  pass  the  time  of  day  wTith  any  printed 


FIRST  THINGS  FIRST  5 

vagabond  who  plucks  at  our  sleeve.  We  have  for¬ 
gotten  Ruskin’s  exclamation:  “Do  you  know,  if 
you  read  this,  that  you  cannot  read  that?” 

It  is  no  longer  necessary  that  anybody  should 
plead  with  us  to  read.  We  read  enough.' — “What 
do  you  read,  my  lord?”  says  Polonius,  and  Hamlet 
answers,  “Words,  words,  words.”  That  is  a  fair 
description  of  a  great  deal  of  reading  in  a  world 
which  someone  has  described  as  “a  blur  of  printed 
paper.” 

^  But  how  many  put  first  books  first?  How  many 
would  think  of  saying  with  Mrs.  Browning:  “No 
man  can  be  called  friendless  when  he  has  God  and 
the  companionship  of  good  books”? 

To  be  sure,  there  are  minor  kinds  of  reading  of 
which  we  all  must  do  more  or  less.  We  read  for  effi¬ 
ciency  in  daily  work.  Modern  business  in  every 
realm,  from  domestic  science  to  international  com¬ 
merce,  has  been  broken  up  into  an  indefinite  num¬ 
ber  of  specialties,  and  books  convey  to  us  the  results 
of  other  men’s  labors.  Any  man,  to  be  an  adept, 
must  read  the  specialists.  But  if  a  man  uses  books 
only  so,  as  Pharaoh  might  use  his  slaves  to  build 
the  pyramid  of  his  success  and  renown,  he  does  not 
know  what  real  reading  means,  * 

Moreover,  we  read  to  keep  up  with  the  times — 
an  endless  stream  of  papers,  magazines,  and  books, 
reflecting  every  changing  situation  in  this  fluid 


6  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

world,  until  we  are  fairly  dizzy  with  the  flood  of 
them.  And  we  read  the  books  that  are  talked 
about  just  because  they  are  talked  about.  Of  all 
social  compulsions  what  is  more  urgent  than  the 

oft-repeated  question:  ‘'Have  you  read - ?” 

That  club  flogs  us  to  our  reading.  “What!”  says 
our  friend,  “you  have  not  read  so  and  so?”  Where¬ 
upon  we  fly  to  the  nearest  bookstore  and  against 
the  necessity  of  conversation  at  the  next  dinner  we 
buy  a  best-seller. 

Yet,  so  continuously  reading,  we  read  everything 
except  the  books  that  we  should  read  first  of  all. 
The  great  books  habitually  are  crowded  out.  The 
little  books  that  are  menially  useful  to  us,  our 
slaves,  running  errands  for  us  to  further  our  con¬ 
venience  or  success,  or  to  dress  us  in  the  tinsel  of  a 
ready  conversation — we  read  those.  But  the  books 
that  are  not  slaves,  but  masters,  at  whose  feet  the 
wise  sit  to  be  taught  and  illumined  and  inspired — 
they  are  crowded  out.  We  should  hardly  think  of 
saying,  as  Charles  Lamb  did,  that  we  should  like 
to  say  grace  over  our  books ;  or  with  Charles 
Kingsley,  “Except  a  living  man,  there  is  nothing 
more  wonderful  than  a  book.” 

Nevertheless,  the  great  books  are  waiting  for  us 
all.  If  the  world’s  poets  and  seers,  prophets  and 
apostles  were  alive,  we  could  hardly  meet  them  one 
by  one,  much  less  talk  with  them.  But  in  a  book 


FIRST  THINGS  FIRST 


7 


they  will  come  to  each  of  us  as  though  there  were  no 
one  else  in  all  the  world  for  them  to  call  upon. 
Though  we  are  so  poor  that  we  must  have  them 
in  paper  covers,  they  will  be  all  there.  Though  we 
are  so  dull  that  we  cannot  understand  at  first,  they 
will  repeat  the  message  to  us  again  and  again. 
Though  we  are  so  foolish  as  to  forget,  they  will  be 
there  on  the  morrow  to  tell  it  to  us  once  more  with 
tireless  patience.  Great  books  are  the  perfect  demo¬ 
crats.  The  shame  of  many  of  us  is  that,  with  such 
books  waiting  to  be  read,  we  stop  to  barter  gossip 
with  every  comer  loafer  on  our  way.  Any  vagrant 
straggler  down  the  literary  street  can  waste  our  at¬ 
tention  and  our  time.  And  because  time  and  atten¬ 
tion  are  limited,  having  read  this,  we  cannot  read 
that. 

hi 

Reading  is  but  one  illustration  of  the  way  in 
which  habitually  the  best  in  life  is  lost  to  us  by 
being  crowded  out.  Dean  Briggs,  of  Harvard,  de¬ 
scribes  a  company  of  American  young  people  whom 
he  saw  in  Rome.  They  were  on  their  first  visit  to 
the  Eternal  City.  Morning  after  morning  they 
arose  with  the  opportunity  of  a  lifetime  awaiting 
them.  The  Forum,  the  Coliseum,  Saint  Peter’s,  the 
whole  city,  fabulously  rich  in  historical  association, 
was  at  their  disposal.  And  every  day  they  settled 


8  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

down  in  the  hotel  for  a  long  morning  at  bridge. 
Cries  Dean  Briggs :  “What  business  had  such  people 
in  Rome?  What  business  had  they  anywhere V1 

So  far  as  our  amusements  are  concerned,  this  loss 
of  the  best,  through  the  preposterous  cramming  of 
our  lives  with  wastage,  is  the  more  common  because 
the  old  Puritanical  attitude  against  popular  recre¬ 
ations  has  gone  to  pieces.  Fortunately  we  can  only 
with  difficulty  imagine  ourselves  back  in  the  time 
when  drama  had  to  be  presented,  if  it  was  to  be  pre¬ 
sented  at  all,  under  the  guise  of  a  free  extra,  inter¬ 
spersed  between  the  musical  numbers  of  a  concert. 
In  Portland,  Maine,  on  July  4,  1820,  the  following 
advertisement  appeared  in  the  public  press: 

“The  public  are  respectfully  informed  that  there  will 
be  a  Concert  of  vocal  and  instrumental  music  this 
evening.  Between  the  parts  of  the  Concert  there  will 
be  performed  ( gratis )  a  celebrated  Play  in  three  acts 
called  The  Point  of  Honor.  To  conclude  with  Shake¬ 
speare’s  admired  farce  in  three  acts  ( gratis )  called 
Katherine  and  Petruchio.” 

That  day  happily  has  gone.  Concerning  popular 
recreations  which  were  once  under  a  rigid  interdict, 
most  of  us  have  come  to  the  conclusion  voiced  by 
the  late  President  Hyde,  of  Bowdoin,  that  they  are 
altogether  too  good  to  be  monopolized  by  the  devil. 
Plenty  of  folk,  however,  having  decided  concern¬ 
ing  popular  amusements  that  they  are  right, 


FIRST  THINGS  FIRST 


9 

forget  that  there  is  still  a  further  question  to  be 
faced:  how  much  time  and  attention  do  they 
deserve? 

“Mr.  Jones/’  said  an  effusive  youth,  “is  the  most 
wonderful  man  I  ever  knew.  He  remembered  every 
card  that  I  held  at  bridge  last  week!”  To  which 
a  girl  with  a  level  head  answered:  “Has  it  ever 
occurred  to  you  that  Mr.  Jones  is  forty-five  years 
old,  and  that  he  doesn’t  know  anything  else?”  The 
trouble  with  Mr.  Jones  is  one  of  our  commonest 
maladies.  If  one  wishes  to  describe  the  disease  in 
prose,  one  may  say  that  in  a  world  where  the  span 
of  life  is  short,  the  energy  of  life  limited,  the  needs 
of  men  appalling,  the  finest  privileges  of  life  enrich¬ 
ing,  Mr.  Jones  is  making  an  ineffable  fool  of  himself 
with  trivial  preoccupation.  If  one  wishes  the  same 
truth  stated  in  poetry,  probably  Emerson  has 
succeeded  best: 

Daughters  of  Time ,  the  hypocritic  Days, 

Muffled  and  dumb  like  barefoot  dervishes, 

And  marching  single  in  an  endless  file, 

Bring  diadems  and  fagots  in  their  hands. 

To  each  they  offer  gifts  after  his  will, 

Bread,  kingdoms,  stars,  and  sky  that  holds  them  all. 
I,  in  my  pleached  garden,  watched  the  pomp, 
Forgot  my  morning  wishes,  hastily 
Took  a  few  herbs  and  apples,  and  the  Day 
Turned  and  departed  silent.  I,  too  late, 

Under  her  solemn  fillet  saw  the  scorn. 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


10 


IV 

The  seriousness  of  this  problem  involved  in  put¬ 
ting  first  things  first  is  not,  however,  adequately 
represented  by  folk  like  Mr.  Jones  or  the  young 
people  in  Rome  or  the  chatterers  on  the  Fifth 
Avenue  bus.  A  young  lad  in  Brooklyn  was  almost 
given  up  in  despair  by  his  mother  because  he  seemed 
addicted  to  trash,  enjoying  nothing  so  much  as  cheap 
cigarettes  to  smoke  and  cheap  tales  to  read.  Then  a 
librarian  got  hold  of  him.  “What  do  you  like  to 
read?”  he  asked. 

“Detective  stories.” 

“Have  you  ever  read  Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich’s 
The  Story  of  a  Bad  Boy’?  It  is  one  of  the  best 
detective  stories  ever  written,”  said  the  librarian. 

So  the  boy  took  the  book  home  and,  retaining 
it  a  week  longer  than  he  usually  kept  books,  re¬ 
turned  it,  saying:  “That  is  the  best  book  I  ever 
read.  Got  any  more?” 

The  librarian  was  also  a  field  lecturer  in  geology, 
and  along  with  feeding  the  boy  better  and  better 
books,  he  persuaded  him  to  go  on  a  field  trip  with 
his  class.  At  the  foot  of  the  Palisades  he  began 
telling  about  the  leisureliness  of  God  laying  the 
foundation  of  the  earth,  when  he  saw  the  boy,  legs 
apart,  arms  akimbo,  eyes  protruding  with  amazed 
interest. 


FIRST  THINGS  FIRST 


11 

Going  home  the  lad  sidled  up  to  him.  “I  never 
heard  anything  like  that  in  all  my  life.  Are  there 
any  books  about  it?” 

So  he  began  reading  geology  and,  to  make  a  long 
story  short,  that  lad,  once  absorbed  in  trash,  is  now 
professor  of  geology  in  a  great  university. 

The  tragedy  of  preoccupation,  however,  is  often 
caused,  not  by  flippant  triviality,  but  by  life’s  ordi¬ 
nary  and  necessary  business.  The  cause  of  alarm 
about  Niagara  Falls  has  been  simply  that  business 
has  been  drawing  off  a  little  stream  here  and  another 
little  stream  there  until  through  many  small  dis¬ 
persions  the  cataract  which  the  Indians  called 
“Thundering  Water”  may  in  the  end  leave  only 
bare  and  ugly  rock. 

Business  is  doing  that  to  people  as  well  as  to 
Niagara.  The  problem  may  be  intensified  in  modern 
times,  but  it  is  not  new.  The  Greeks  had  a  proverb, 
“Zeus  frowns  upon  the  overbusy.”  The  Master 
himself  told  a  story  about  men  who,  being  absorbed 
in  a  farm,  in  a  newly  purchased  team  of  oxen  or  in 
a  freshly  established  home,  missed  the  greatest 
opportunity  of  their  lives. 

The  consequences  of  this  sort  of  preoccupation 
are  often  pathetic.  An  American  once  stormed 
through  one  of  the  great  European  galleries  of  art. 
He  sniffed  at  this  picture  an  instant;  he  sniffed  an 
instant  at  that;  and  then  he  stormed  out.  But 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


12 


before  he  went  he  turned  on  the  venerable  atten¬ 
dant  at  the  door  and  said:  “Not  a  thing  here  worth 
seeing — not  a  thing!” 

To  which  the  attendant  replied,  “If  you  please, 
sir,  these  pictures  are  no  longer  on  trial — the  spec¬ 
tators  are.” 

That  dull-eyed  visitor  doubtless  was  a  very  busy 
man.  He  had  started  with  normal  capacities  to  ap¬ 
preciate  the  finest  gifts  of  life,  but,  preoccupied  with 
many  tasks,  he  had  lost  through  atrophy  the  power 
to  love  the  highest  when  he  saw  it. 

One  result  of  this  absorbing  material  business, 
which  so  crowds  out  attention  to  the  things  of  the 
spirit,  is  the  appalling  vulgarity  of  our  personal  and 
public  life.  We  forget  that,  while  we  may  not  be 
able  to  create  those  forms  of  beauty  which  will  last 
forever,  we  have  another  ability  which  is  almost  as 
wonderful:  we  can  love  them  when  they  are  created; 
we  can  rejoice  in  them  and  grow  rich  because  of 
them.  So  Browning  makes  his  Cleon  say: 

I  have  not  chanted  verse  like  Homer,  no — 

Nor  swept  string  like  Terpander,  no — nor  carved 
And  painted  men  like  Phidias  and  his  friend; 

I  am  not  great  as  they  are,  point  by  point. 

But  I  have  entered  into  sympathy 

With  these  four,  running  these  into  one  soul, 

Who,  separate,  ignored  each  other’s  art. 

Say,  is  it  nothing  that  I  know  them  all? 


FIRST  THINGS  FIRST 


13 


We  do  not  deliberately  decide  to  lose  all  this 
beauty  from  our  lives — the  best  books,  the  best 
music,  the  best  art ;  we  are  simply  busy.  There  are 
so  many  other  things  which  press  upon  us  with 
urgent  clamor  to  be  done  that  we  let  the  best  things 
go.  In  the  end,  for  all  the  money  that  we  make, 
we  are  like  the  Mohammedan  beggars  on  the  steps 
of  St.  Sophia  in  Constantinople,  standing  with  their 
backs  to  the  great  mosque,  careless  of  its  history,  its 
symbolism,  its  beauty,  crying  “Baksheesh!  Bak¬ 
sheesh  !” 


v 

The  climax  of  this  test’s  application  concerns  a 
deeper  matter  than  the  lost  esthetic  values  in  which 
excessive  busyness  results.  It  concerns  some  of  our 
lost  moral  and  religious  values.  The  problem  of 
the  family,  for  example,  would  be  in  a  fair  way 
toward  solution  if  fathers  and  mothers  would  once 
more  put  first  things  first  in  their  relationships  with 
their  children. 

One  of  the  troubles  with  this  much  berated 
younger  generation  is  not  primarily  with  this 
younger  generation  at  all,  but  with  the  older  gen¬ 
eration.  The  younger  generation  does  not  so  much 
need  critics  as  it  needs  examples.  “When  my  father 
and  my  mother  forsake  me,  then  the  Boy  Scouts 
will  take  me  up” — such  is  the  rendering  given  to  an 


14  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

ancient  Psalm  by  an  observant  watcher  of  our  fam¬ 
ily  life.  For  fathers  and  mothers,  preoccupied  with 
many  tasks,  have  farmed  their  children  out  to  any 
agency,  from  school  and  scout  troop  to  a  summer 
camp,  where  they  can  be  rid  of  their  responsibility. 
They  use  these  helps,  not  as  helps,  but  as  substi¬ 
tutes  for  the  family  life. 

A  father,  whose  son  had  been  dropped  from  sev¬ 
eral  schools  and  colleges  and  who  confessed  that  he 
knew  nothing  whatever  about  the  boy,  recently 
took  him  to  another  college  and  demanded  that,  as 
a  quid  pro  quo  for  money  given,  that  institution 
should  assume  the  problem  of  his  son.  “I  am  a  very 
busy  man,”  he  said,  “and  I  have  no  time  to  attend 
to  him.” 

The  trouble  with  that  father  is  mot  lack  of  time. 
He  has  time  to  do  those  things  which  he  consid¬ 
ers  essential.  His  difficulty  is  that  he  thinks  some 
things  are  more  important  than  caring  about  his  son, 
that  some  entrustments  are  more  sacred  than  that. 

Once,  in  the  gray  of  a  winter  dawn,  an  early  riser 
watched  a  stooped  and  aged  woman  groping  about 
a  building  in  process  of  construction,  picking  up  bits 
of  lath  and  sawed-off  ends  of  lumber.  It  was  a 
pathetic  sight  to  see  a  woman  reduced  to  the  off¬ 
scourings  of  the  wood  for  fire  to  warm  her  house¬ 
hold.  But  even  more  pathetic  is  it  to  see  the  finest 
relationships  of  human  life,  our  friends,  our  fam- 


FIRST  THINGS  FIRST 


15 


ilies,  and  at  last  our  God,  seeking  around  the  main 
business  of  our  days  for  the  scraps  and  left-overs  of 
our  attention.  We  give  the  logwood  of  our  life  to 
secondary  matters;  to  the  highest  we  give  the  chips. 

More  than  anything  else  one  suspects  that  this  is 
at  the  root  of  irreligion.  It  is  not  skepticism,  but 
preoccupation,  which  generally  makes  the  inner¬ 
most  relationships  of  a  man’s  soul  with  God  of  no 
account.  The  highest  is  in  us  all.  At  times  it 
flames  up  and  we  know  that  we  are  not  dust  but 
spirit,  and  that  in  fellowship  with  the  Spiritual  Life, 
from  whom  we  came,  is  our  power  and  our  peace. 
But  many  a  man  who  has  known  the  meaning  and 
the  might  of  this  relationship  has  largely  lost  it,  not 
because  theoretically  he  has  disbelieved,  but  because 
practically  he  has  crowded  it  out. 

“Sometime,”  the  man  says,  “I  will  attend  to  these 
deepest  and  finest  relationships.” 

Meanwhile  he  picks  up  his  life  as  a  football  run¬ 
ner  does  the  ball  and  speeds  across  the  field.  He 
does  not  notice  the  ground  across  which  he  runs; 
his  eyes  are  set  upon  the  goal.  He  has  no  present ; 
he  has  only  a  future.  The  most  enriching  relation¬ 
ships  of  life,  from  family  love  and  friendship  to 
religious  faith,  offer  their  best  to  him,  but  he  runs 
by.  “Sometime,”  he  says. 

That  time  never  comes ;  it  never  will  come.  What 
he  needs  most  to  learn  is  that  the  days  are  not  a 


16  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

football  field  to  be  run  over,  but  gardens  to  be 
tilled,  and  that,  if  tilled  well,  they  can  grow  now 
the  things  of  which  heaven  is  made.  “Carpe  diem” 
said  the  Latins — “Seize  the  day/’  Some  people  who 
for  many  years  have  been  doing  the  opposite, 
crowding  out  the  best  by  preoccupation  and  post¬ 
ponement,  might  well  begin  a  new  year  with  the 
single  resolution  to  put  first  things  first. 

For  the  ultimate  trouble  with  preoccupation  is 
that  it  takes  no  account  of  the  flight  of  time.  Some¬ 
one  has  figured  human  life  as  covering  the  span  of 
a  single  day’s  waking  hours  from  six  in  the  morn¬ 
ing  until  ten  at  night.  Then  if  a  man  is  twenty 
years  old,  it  is  ten  o’clock  in  the  morning  with  him ; 
if  he  is  thirty,  it  is  high  noon;  if  he  is  forty,  it  is 
two  in  the  afternoon;  if  he  is  sixty,  it  is  six  in  the 
evening.  So  the  day  passes  and  the  enriching  ex¬ 
periences  which  fellowship  with  the  Highest  offers 
us  are  lost,  not  because  we  deliberately  discard 
them,  but  because  our  time  and  attention  are 
preengaged. 

The  famous  Bargello  portrait  of  Dante  was  lost 
for  years.  Men  knew  there  was  such  a  portrait,  but 
they  did  not  know  where  it  was.  Then  an  artist, 
resolved  on  finding  it,  started  his  search  with  the 
room  where  tradition  had  located  it.  The  room  wras 
a  storehouse  for  wastage ;  straw  and  lumber  littered 
the  floor  and  whitewash  covered  the  walls.  But 


FIRST  THINGS  FIRST 


17 


when  the  rubbish  had  been  carted  out  and  the 
whitewash  was  being  removed,  old  lines  long  ob¬ 
scured  began  to  appear  and  colors  long  hidden  be¬ 
came  visible,  until  at  last  the  grave,  lofty,  noble 
face  of  the  great  poet  was  recovered  for  the  world. 
Nobody  had  destroyed  the  Bargello  portrait,  but 
somebody  had  littered  it  up.  Straw  and  lumber 
and  whitewash  had  seemed  to  somebody  more 
important  than  the  face. 


Long  Ropes  and  Strong  Stakes 


I 

ENRY  WARD  BEECHER,  so  we  are 
told,  would  often  work  out  an  idea 
through  a  long  course  of  abstract  argu¬ 
ment  until  suddenly  his  thought  took 
fire  and  blazed  out  in  a  simile  or  metaphor.  Then 
the  wise  preacher  would  draw  his  pencil  through 
the  laborious  disquisition,  and  all  that  the  people 
ever  got  was  a  flaming  picture.  One  suspects  that 
Isaiah  had  gone  through  some  such  procedure  when, 
having  long  brooded  over  the  estate  of  his  people, 
he  flashed  out  his  vision  of  their  need:  “Lengthen 
your  ropes  and  strengthen  your  stakes.”  •  Any 
camper  acquainted  with  tents  recognizes  the  figure. 
When  you  pitch  a  tent,  if  you  do  lengthen  the  ropes 
you  must  strengthen  the  stakes. 

One  does  not  have  to  look  far  in  modern  life 
to  discover  examples  of  such  increased  extension 
calling  for  increased  stability.  A  prominent  busi¬ 
ness  man  recently  went  to  pieces  in  a  collapse  of 

18 


LONG  ROPES  AND  STRONG  STAKES  19 


character  that  astonished  his  friends.  He  had  all 
the  typical  modern  virtues — energy,  forcefulness, 
vigor,  the  aggressive  ability  to  put  things  across. 
But  he  lacked  moral  stability.  Evidently  his  activ¬ 
ity  had  been  stretched  at  the  expense  of  his  steadi¬ 
ness.  He  was  living  an  overextended  life.  Like  a 
tipsy  tent,  he  had  long  ropes  and  weak  stakes. 

Mark  Twain  said  once,  “If  I  were  a  heathen, 
I  would  rear  a  statue  to  Energy,  and  fall  down  and 
worship  it.”  That  is  entirely  characteristic  of  the 
modern  age.  Think  of  the  words  which  our  genera¬ 
tion’s  attitudes  naturally  suggest.  They  are  all 
words  of  action.  Aggressive,  progressive,  dynamic, 
vigorous — such  words  are  applicable  to  our  time. 
But  who,  describing  our  modernity,  would  ever 
think  of  words  like  these:  poise,  balance,  peace, 
steadfastness,  stability?  Yet  anyone  who  knows 
either  biography  or  history  must  see  that  one  of 
the  primary  tests  of  character  is  the  ability  to  in¬ 
crease  staunchness  as  you  extend  strain.  Man’s  life 
is  like  a  tree.  Branches  demand  roots;  every 
increase  in  the  superstructure,  giving  purchase  for 
the  wind  to  get  hold  upon,  requires  a  new  grip  on 
the  steadfast  earth. 

Some  of  the  most  lamentable  collapses  in  history 
have  taken  place  in  overextended  lives  which  neg¬ 
lected  this  elemental  necessity.  Francis  Bacon,  for 
example,  had  one  of  the  most  useful  and  able  minds 


20  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

ever  entrusted  to  a  man.  When  he  was  scarcely 
fifteen  years  old,  the  great  thought  took  possession 
of  him  that  the  ancient  method  of  studying  nature 
was  wrong  and  that  he  was  meant  to  right  it.  The 
spirit  in  which  he  went  about  that  work,  the  results 
of  which  have  put  the  world  eternally  in  his  debt, 
is  fairly  indicated  by  a  memorandum  written  in  his 
early  forties  and  never  intended  for  publicity:  “Be¬ 
lieving  that  I  was  bom  for  the  service  of  mankind, 
and  regarding  the  care  of  the  commonwealth  as  a 
kind  of  common  property,  which,  like  the  air  and 
the  water,  belongs  to  everybody,  I  set  myself  to  con¬ 
sider  in  what  way  mankind  might  best  be  served, 
and  what  service  I  was  myself  best  fitted  by  nature 
to  perform.”  Moreover,  he  had  moral  insight  of  a 
high  order,  as  is  shown  by  his  essays,  which  still 
remain  classic  in  the  literature  of  ethics.  His  life 
was  not  blameless,  but  he  probably  would  have 
lived  and  died  in  respectability  had  it  not  been  for 
his  advancement  in  power.  He  was  made  Lord 

* 

Chancellor  of  England.  He  was  created  Viscount 
St.  Albans.  He  moved  out  into  an  extended  oppor¬ 
tunity  and  became,  not  only  the  most  learned 
man  in  the  empire,  but  also  one  of  the  most  power¬ 
ful.  And  then  he  fell.  Convicted  of  gross  bribery 
and  financial  corruption,  to  which  he  abjectly  con¬ 
fessed,  he  lived  his  last  five  years  a  disgraced  man. 


LONG  ROPES  AND  STRONG  STAKES  21 


The  length  of  his  ropes  got  beyond  the  strength  of 
his  stakes. 

Countless  similar  stories  bear  witness  to  the  fact 
that  man’s  life  is  built,  like  a  Gothic  cathedral,  on 
the  principle  of  balanced  thrusts.  Every  new  arch 
must  be  braced  with  a  new  foundation.  Lifting  the 
altitude  or  spreading  the  expanse  of  the  nave  re¬ 
quires  stronger  supporting  walls  or  flying  buttresses. 
Each  outthrust  calls  for  an  inthrust.  And  the 
difficulty  in  our  expansive  modern  life  lies  here: 
ever  achieving  new  powers,  enlarging  our  oppor¬ 
tunities,  widening  our  liberties  and  everywhere 
complicating  our  lives,  we  forget  that,  unless  we 
correspondingly  strengthen  our  moral  and  spiritual 
foundations,  the  whole  overextended  superstructure 
will  come  down  about  our  ears,  as  did  the  old 
Philistine  banquet  hall  when  Samson  broke  the 
pillars. 


ii 

A  vivid  illustration  of  the  truth  which  we  are 
driving  at  is  presented  in  our  modern  young  people. 
They  are  enjoying  a  greatly  extended  freedom,  to 
balance  which  they  have  not  yet  achieved  a  stabi¬ 
lizing  self-control.  Young  people  used  to  be  under 
artificial,  external  restraint.  Even  though,  as 
Ruskin  said,  Sunday  did  cast  a  “lurid  shade”  two 


22  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


days  in  advance,  they  had  to  go  through  it.  They 
may  not  have  been  saints  above  the  present  repre¬ 
sentatives  of  youth,  but  they  were  compelled,  the 
girls  especially,  by  the  strict  canons  of  the  social 
code,  to  act  more  as  though  they  were.  Parental 
authority  was  still  in  vogue  and,  while  fathers  and 
mothers  were  probably  no  wiser  than  they  are  now, 
their  ipse  dixit  had  more  weight  and  drive  in  it 
when  they  assumed  the  purple  and  played  the  auto¬ 
crat. 

In  this  last  generation  these  external  restraints 
have  been  giving  way  at  an  accelerating  rate.  Let 
us  hasten  to  rejoice  in  it!  A  visit  to  the  Far  East 
should  encourage  our  wavering  faith  in  the  general 
soundness  of  our  Western  methods  of  treating 
youth.  The  whole  Asiatic  tradition  is  on  the  side 
of  solving  youth’s  problems,  and  especially  the 
problem  of  relationship  between  the  sexes,  by 
seclusion  and  repression.  In  an  old-fashioned 
Chinese  home,  the  girl  from  her  twelfth  year  on 
did  not  go  outside  her  father’s  house  until  she  went 
to  her  husband’s,  and  a  Japanese  girl  when  grown 
could  say  that  she  had  never  come  so  near  a  man, 
even  her  own  brother,  as  to  touch  his  hand. 

We  in  the  West  are  trying  the  opposite  method. 
Our  young  people  are  the  freemen  of  history — the 
most  unsecluded,  unsuppressed,  unsuperintended 
youth  of  all  time.  Our  ideal  is  to  train  them  in 


LONG  ROPES  AND  STRONG  STAKES  23 


individual  initiative,  to  develop  independent  judg¬ 
ment  and  control,  to  throw  them  on  their  own  re¬ 
sources^ — which  is  excellent  when  they  have  the 
resources!  But  many  of  them  are  making  unmiti¬ 
gated  nuisances  of  themselves  because  the  length 
of  their  freedom  has  got  away  beyond  the  strength 
of  their  self-control.  An  unchaperoned  group  of 
girls,  supposedly  from  “our  best  families,”  recently 
went  with  a  publicly  organized  party  on  a  European 
tour.  During  the  entire  trip  they  drank  to  excess, 
they  smoked  to  excess,  and  their  personal  immod¬ 
esty  became  a  scandal  to  the  party.  They  were 
enjoying  a  degree  of  liberty  never  before  accorded 
to  young  women,  and  they  were  betraying  their 
utter  inability  to  handle  it.  Granting  the  social 
restraints  of  even  a  generation  ago,  those  same  girls 
probably  would  be  decent,  modest,  self-respecting 
young  women.  As  it  is,  their  lengthened  ropes  have 
betrayed  their  weak  stakes  and  their  tents  are 
wildly  flapping  in  the  wind. 

If,  therefore,  one  had  a  chance  to  broadcast  a  mes¬ 
sage  which  all  young  people  would  hear,  one  might 
well  choose  some  such  theme  as  this:  real  freedom 
never  consists  in  mere  release  from  old  restraints. 

A  young  tree  set  out  in  a  city’s  park  with  an  iron 
cage  around  it  for  support  may  well  resent  the 
humiliation  of  that  external  curb,  but  if  all  the  free¬ 
dom  which  the  tree  seeks  is  release  from  that  en- 


24  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


cumbrance  it  will  discover  that  the  only  freedom 
which  it  has  achieved  is  freedom  to  fall  over  when 
the  wind  blows.  The  first  step  toward  real  freedom 
for  that  tree  is  to  grow  deep  roots  of  its  own  on 
which  it  can  depend.  Freedom  never  is  obtained 
by  mere  release  from  old  limitations;  freedom  is 
the  positive  substitution  of  inward  self-control  for 
external  restraints. 

This  unlearned  truth  has  cost  the  race  some  stiff 
experiences.  The  first  warriors  for  democracy,  for 
example,  were  tempted  to  believe  that  they  would 
be  free  if  only  they  could  slay  the  tyrant  and  over¬ 
turn  the  throne  on  which  so  long  and  so  oppres¬ 
sively  he  had  been  sitting.  They  had  to  learn  that 
they  could  behead  Louis  XVI  and  get  Robespierre 
in  his  place.  They  have  just  been  learning  that 
they  can  shoot  the  Czar  and  get  Lenine  and 
Trotzky  instead.  Freedom  in  the  state  does  not 
consist  alone  in  making  a  tyrant  stop  taking  charge 
of  the  people;  it  consists  in  the  intelligent  ability 
of  the  people  to  take  charge  of  themselves.  Real 
democracy  was  not  won  when  kings  went;  real 
democracy  is  still  to  be  won.  The  facts  which  our 
incipient,  embryonic  democracy  must  face  are  more 
staggering  than  the  old  tyrants  were — for  example, 
that  at  the  last  presidential  election  almost  twenty- 
eight  million  people  who  were  qualified  to  vote  did 
not  exercise  that  privilege;  that  an  accredited  esti- 


LONG  ROPES  AND  STRONG  STAKES  25 


mate  is  possibly  true  that  in  the  United  States  four 
million  people  are  living  in  destitution.  The  ques¬ 
tion  now  is  not  whether  a  tyrant  shall  continue  to 
control  us;  the  question  is  whether  the  people  will 
prove  able  profitably  to  control  themselves.  That 
is  always  the  ultimate  question  in  any  campaign 
for  freedom.  And  the  youth  of  this  generation  need 
very  much  to  learn  it. 

This  is  no  sweeping  indictment  of  our  young 
people.  The  criticisms  hurled  against  them  are  often 
frantic  and  extreme.  Many  of  the  critics  forget 
their  own  youth;  many  others  mistake  superficial 
eddies  for  main  currents;  many  others,  seeing 
rightly  the  wayward  wildness  of  some  of  the 
younger  generation,  fail  to  see  the  splendid  spirit 
of  the  rest  of  them.  They  take  no  note  of  the  sac¬ 
rificial  devotion  with  which  some  youths  are  taking 
this  chaotic,  bloody  world  from  the  hands  of  the 
older  generation  in  the  hope  of  making  something 
out  of  it.  But  when  all  such  allowance  has  been 
made,  a  serious  problem  remains. 

There  are  altogether  too  many  of  our  young  peo¬ 
ple  who,  in  expansion  of  their  freedom,  have  passed 
the  limit.  Their  staunchness  is  not  equal  to  the 
strain. 


26  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


HI 

In  another  way  this  same  test  of  character  is 
illustrated  in  the  expansion  of  the  powers  and 
privileges  of  modern  women.  The  gaining  of  this 
amplified  life  for  womanhood  has  been  a  great 
fight.  Even  equality  with  men  before  the  law  has 
been  denied  women  in  our  Anglo-Saxon  jurispru¬ 
dence  up  to  our  own  generation.  Today  we  are 
debating  the  problem  of  equal  pay  for  equal  work; 
two  centuries  ago  women  were  vainly  desiring  equal 
punishment  for  equal  crime. 

Even  today  the  law  does  not  recognize  the  mis¬ 
conduct  of  a  husband  as  equally  culpable  with  the 
misconduct  of  a  wife.  Indeed,  no  woman  in  Eng¬ 
land  ever  protested  publicly  and  legally  against  her 
husband’s  infidelity  until  1801  and  there  were  only 
three  cases  up  to  1840  where  a  wife  took  the  initia¬ 
tive  in  suit  for  divorce.  Until  1857,  in  England,  a 
woman  when  she  married  relinquished  all  property 
of  her  own,  even  her  daily  earnings  if  she  worked, 
into  the  absolute  control  of  her  husband.  No  revo¬ 
lution  in  human  history  is  more  important  than  the 
emancipation  of  womanhood  from  such  serfdom  to 
her  present  independence. 

She  has  won  the  right  to  be  educated.  It  was  not 
easy  to  win.  Mary  Somerville,  overcoming,  as  her 
daughter  says,  “obstacles  apparently  insurmount- 


LONG  ROPES  AND  STRONG  STAKES  27 


able,  at  a  time  when  women  were  well-nigh  totally 
debarred  from  education”;  Charlotte  Bronte,  writ¬ 
ing  in  secret  and  publishing  under  a  pseudonym 
because  only  so  could  she  hope  for  just  criticism; 
Harriet  Hunt,  admitted  to  the  Harvard  Medical 
School  in  1850  but  forced  out  by  the  enraged 
students;  Elizabeth  Blackwell,  applying  to  twelve 
medical  schools  before  she  could  secure  admission, 
and  meeting  with  insult  and  contumely  in  her  en¬ 
deavor  to  study  and  practice  medicine ;  Mary  Lyon, 
treated  as  a  wild  fanatic  because  she  wanted  Ameri¬ 
can  girls  to  be  educated — such  figures  are  typical 
in  woman’s  struggle  for  intellectual  opportunity.  It 
has  been  a  great  fight  and  the  victory  is  almost 
contemporary. 

Difficult,  too,  has  been  woman’s  struggle  for  the 
right  to  work.  For  while  men  for  a  long  time  have 
been  entirely  willing  that  women  should  scrub  their 
office  stairs,  only  recently  have  they  become  wil¬ 
ling  that  women  should  be  lawyers,  physicians, 
ministers  and  merchants.  As  for  political  equality, 
Charles  Fox  said  in  1797:  “It  has  never  been  sug¬ 
gested  in  all  the  theories  and  projects  of  the  most 
absurd  speculation,  that  it  would  be  advisable  to 
extend  the  elective  suffrage  to  the  female  sex.” 

A  typical  modern  woman  glories  in  this  ex¬ 
panded  life  which  has  come  to  womanhood  from 
this  fourfold  struggle  for  legal,  educational,  occupa- 


28  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

tional,  and  political  freedom.  There  is  occasion 
here,  however,  for  something  besides  jubilation. 
One  need  not  be  reactionary  to  see  that  these 
lengthened  ropes  are  pulling  on  the  stakes.  Many 
women  of  this  new  generation  are  not  profiting  at 
all  by  their  enlarged  privilege;  they  are  simply 
exhibiting  their  lack  of  balance  in  handling  it.  The 
desirable  solution  does  not  lie  in  shortening  the 
ropes,  but  it  does  lie  in  strengthening  the  stakes. 
After  a  long  and  successful  battle  for  expanded 
opportunity,  modern  womanhood  needs  reemphasis 
upon  the  spiritual  factors  which  make  not  so  much 
for  extension  as  for  depth.  Unless  we  can  get  out 
of  the  new  system  motherhood  as  consecrated, 
spiritual  quality  as  fine,  idealism  as  exalted,  relig¬ 
ious  faith  as  cleansing  and  ennobling  as  distin¬ 
guished  previous  generations,  the  new  system  will 
have  failed  in  its  most  important  object. 

J 

IV 

All  history  is  a  running  commentary  upon  the 
danger  of  an  overextended  life.  As  one  watches  the 
advance  of  civilization  he  can  observe  two  processes 
in  continual  operation.  The  first  is  expansion. 
Florescent  days  come  in  history  when  new  ideals 
light  men’s  minds  and  new  achievements  crowm 
their  endeavors — as  when  the  new  astronomy  en- 


LONG  ROPES  AND  STRONG  STAKES  29 


larged  the  universe,  or  when  Columbus  and  his  fel¬ 
low  pioneers  opened  new  continents  to  the  imagi¬ 
nation  and  use  of  mankind,  or  when  the  new  science 
began  putting  into  man’s  hands  mastery  over  the 
world’s  latent  resources.  Such  periods  of  expansion 
amplify  our  lives  and  enlarge  their  opportunities. 

Always,  however,  a  second  process — not  expan¬ 
sion  but  consolidation — must  be  close  behind  when 
this  new  outreaching  of  life  threatens  to  overextend 
itself  and  end  in  ruin.  In  the  business  world,  for 
example,  the  wonder  is  not  that  discord  and  wrong 
so  prevail.  The  marvel  is  that  the  human  mind 
and  will  have  developed  sufficiently  to  run  our 
modern  business  at  all. 

Just  after  the  Revolutionary  War,  John  Marshall 
described  the  American  nation  as  “an  infant 
people,  spreading  themselves  through  a  wilderness 
occupied  only  by  savages  and  wild  beasts.”  The 
life  of  a  merchant  prince  or  financier  of  those  early 
days  must  have  been  comparatively  simple.  No 
steam-driven  machines,  no  telephone,  telegraph  or 
wireless,  no  organized  labor,  no  fluctuating  foreign 
exchange,  and  the  other  side  of  the  ocean  so  far 
away  that  Thomas  Jefferson  could  hope  that 
Europe  would  never  have  more  to  do  with'  us  than 
with  China!  How  we  have  lengthened  our  ropes 
since  then!  Many  a  modern  business  man  as  a 
matter  of  course  now  carries  responsibilities  so  great 


30  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

that  in  comparison  an  ancient  emperor  would  look 
like  a  small  retail  merchant  on  a  side  street. 

In  consequence,  the  immediate  need  of  our  busi¬ 
ness  life  is  not  more  extended  activity  but  more 
fundamental  morality.  So,  in  a  military  operation, 
the  charge  may  be  enthusiastically  pushed  and  new 
ground  gained  rapidly  until  the  commanders  become 
worried  about  their  very  success.  The  process  of 
advance  may  be  carried  perilously  far.  The  time 
comes  when  the  men  must  dig  in,  the  lines  must 
be  consolidated,  the  communications  with  the  base 
must  be  reestablished,  the  commissariat  must  be 
brought  up. 

v 

By  this  new  world  of  complicated  relationships 
the  lives  of  all  of  us  are  encompassed.  Multitudes 
of  people  are  habitually  stretched  to  their  utmost 
to  meet  its  demands.  Most  of  us  are  living  under 
a  strain  that  human  nature  never  was  intended  to 
bear.  The  resultant  need  is  evident.  Long  em¬ 
phasis  upon  expansion  must  be  matched  by  renewed 
emphasis  upon  those  spiritual  forces  which  stabilize 
and  fortify  men,  confirm  them  in  self-control,  build 
moral  foundations  under  them,  give  tenacity  to  meet 
tension  and  steadfastness  to  meet  strain. 

And  among  all  such  forces  there  is  nothing  to 
compare  with  real  religion. 


LONG  ROPES  AND  STRONG  STAKES  31 


Why  is  it,  for  example,  that  whenever  in  recent 
years  books  like  Wagner’s  'The  Simple  Life”  or 
Cabot’s  “What  Men  Live  By”  have  been  published 
the  sale  has  been  phenomenal?  Is  it  not  because 
there  is  something  the  matter  with  us  in  the  realm 
in  which  such  books  move? 

We  are  energetic,  forceful,  vigorous,  progressive. 
But  we  are  also  distracted,  harassed,  perplexed, 
overstrained,  restless.  Our  excessive  activity  runs 
to  froth  and  fume.  We  lack  adequate  spiritual  re¬ 
serves,  and  it  never  can  be  well  with  us  until  we 
find  them. 

Peace,  for  example,  in  its  personal  meaning,  is  a 
word  which  is  not  only  inapplicable  to  modern  life 
but  is  even  distasteful  to  modern  ears.  Like  Mark 
Twain  we  would  erect  an  altar  to  Energy,  but 
hardly  to  Peace.  But  no  person  or  generation  can 
in  the  end  afford  to  take  that  attitude.  Peaceless- 
ness  is  the  symptom  of  a  deadly  malady,  for  it  is 
the  sign  of  powerlessness.  It  springs  from  the  lack 
of  adequate  resources.  Find  a  man,  for  example, 
who  is  worried  about  his  business  and  you  will  prob¬ 
ably  discover  that  he  has  overextended  himself. 
When  credit  is  easy  his  business  grows  rapidly,  but 
with  stringency  in  the  money  market  and  credit 
tight  he  discovers  that  he  is  not  ready  for  an  emer¬ 
gency.  Of  course  he  is  anxious;  anxiety  is  due  to 
insufficient  power  in  reserve.  It  is  nervous  busi- 


32  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

ness  trying  to  live  in  a  tent  whose  ropes  are  long 
and  whose  stakes  are  weak. 

Peace,  on  the  other  hand,  is  one  of  the  supreme, 
positive  achievements  of  the  human  spirit,  because 
it  means  the  possession  of  adequate  resources. 
Peace  in  daily  work  is  the  consciousness  of  health 
and  ability  to  spare  so  that  when  one’s  tasks  are 
done  there  is  a  margin  all  around.  Peace  in  business 
is  the  consciousness  of  capital  in  plenty,  so  that 
one  need  not  fear  what  the  day  may  bring.  Peace  in 
the  family  is  the  consciousness  that,  under  all  the 
strains  inevitably  incident  to  the  running  of  a  home, 
there  is  an  unfailing  wealth  of  love-^and  devotion 
and  fidelity  to  fall  back  upon.  Peace  in  the  soul  is 
the  consciousness  that,  however  difficult  life  may  be, 
we  are  not  living  it  alone,  that  above  and  beneath 
and  around  us  are  the  resources  of  the  Eternal 
Spirit,  that  we  can  depend  upon  the  reality,  near¬ 
ness  and  availability  of  the  Unseen  Friend. 

In  this  age  of  overextended  activity,  our  streets 
are  thronged  with  people  whose  fundamental  need 
is  such  spiritual  underpinning,  and  whatever  else 
it  may  be  the  function  of  religion  at  its  best  to  pro¬ 
vide,  it  certainly  is  the  business  of  religion  to  pro¬ 
vide  that.  In  the  last  analysis  nothing  except  a 
deep  and  downright  faith  in  God  can  provide  that. 
We  all  have  read  those  books  of  Mark  Twain  which 
so  have  added  to  the  merriment  of  nations,  but  it 


LONG  ROPES  AND  STRONG  STAKES  33 

would  be  profitable  at  least  once  to  read  Mark 
Twain’s  final  summary  of  life’s  meaning,  his  delib¬ 
erate  and  well-considered  statement  of  mankind’s 
significance  upon  this  earth: 

“A  myriad  of  men  are  born;  they  labor  and  sweat 
and  struggle  for  bread;  they  squabble  and  scold  and 
fight;  they  scramble  for  little  mean  advantages  over 
each  other;  age  creeps  upon  them;  infirmities  follow; 
shames  and  humiliations  bring  down  their  prides  and 
their  vanities;  those  they  love  are  taken  from  them, 
and  the  joy  of  life  is  turned  to  aching  grief.  The  burden 
of  pain,  care,  misery  grows  heavier  year  by  year;  at 
length  ambition  is  dead;  pride  is  dead;  vanity  is  dead; 
longing  for  release  is  in  their  place.  It  comes  at  last — 
the  only  unpoisoned  gift  earth  ever  had  for  them — and 
they  vanish  from  a  world  where  they  were  of  no  conse¬ 
quence,  where  they  achieved  nothing,  where  they  were 
a  mistake  and  a  failure  and  a  foolishness;  where  they 
have  left  no  sign  that  they  have  existed — a  world  which 
will  lament  them  a  day  and  forget  them  forever.” 

Endeavoring  to  explain  these  words  upon  the 
lips  of  such  a  man  as  Mark  Twain,  one  cannot  say 
that  Mark  Twain  had  a  melancholy  temperament, 
for  he  made  the  whole  world  laugh.  One  cannot  say 
that  Mark  Twain  lacked  moral  quality  and  courage, 
for  he  did  not.  He  was  a  robust,  vigorous,  admir¬ 
able  man.  One  of  the  finest  deeds  in  the  annals 
of  financial  integrity  is  Mark  Twain’s  voluntary 
shouldering  of  a  debt  of  honor  and  his  paying  of 


34  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

it  at  the  cost  of  infinite  labor.  Nor  can  one  say 
that  Mark  Twain  did  not  have  at  his  disposal  all 
that  modern  knowledge  could  tell  him.  But  Mark 
Twain  had  utterly  lost  his  religious  faith.  He  had 
concluded  that  the  ultimate  reality  is  physical  and 
nothing  more.  He  had  decided  that  when  human¬ 
ity  has  finished  its  course  on  this  earth,  it  will  all 
have  been,  as  another  phrased  it,  “  a  brief  and  dis¬ 
creditable  episode  on  one  of  the  minor  planets.” 
That  materialistic  philosophy  knocked  the  founda¬ 
tions  out.  For  spiritual  stability  that  can  stand  the 
strain  of  life’s  toil  and  the  shock  of  life’s  tragedy 
and  bring  a  man  out  inwardly  victorious  over  dis¬ 
appointment  and  disillusion  is  to  be  found  ulti¬ 
mately  in  a  clear  religious  insight  that 

.  .  .  This  world’s  no  blot  for  us 

Nor  blank ;  it  means  intensely,  and  means  good. 

Granted  all  that  is  to  be  said  against  the  type  of 
religion  that  is  popularly  presented  in  our  day,  the 
fact  remains  that  what  we  need  most  is  more  re¬ 
ligion  of  a  better  kind.  This  twentieth  century  is 
desperately  in  need  of  stabilizing  forces,  and  in  per¬ 
sonal  character  one  of  the  primary  tests  is  the  ability 
to  realize  in  experience  an  ideal  presented  long  ago : 
“Everyone  therefore  that  heareth  these  words  of 
mine,  and  doeth  them,  shall  be  likened  unto  a  wise 
man,  who  built  his  house  upon  the  rock.” 


A  High  Opinion  of  Oneself 


I 

VERY  right-minded  person  feels  horrified 
at  the  banditry  which  has  disgraced  our 
cities  since  the  war.  When  one  stops  to 
analyze  the  reason  why  we  feel  that  hor¬ 
ror  the  explanation  is  clear.  The  bandits  have 
exhibited  a  type  of  character  in  whose  eyes  little, 
if  anything,  is  sacred.  Human  life  itself  is  not 
sacred — they  murder  for  a  song.  Truth  is  not 
sacred — they  lie  with  ease.  Friendship  is  not  sacred 
— they  betray  their  own  without  a  qualm. 

•  In  what  sharp  contrast,  on  the  other  hand,  stand 
the  men  who  respect  life’s  sanctities.  An  old  Edin¬ 
burgh  weaver  used  habitually  to  pray,  “0  God,  help 
me  to  hold  a  high  opinion  of  myself.”  One  imag¬ 
ines  behind  that  Scotchman’s  life  such  a  home  as 
Burns  described  in  “The  Cotter’s  Saturday  Night,” 
where  the  profound  meanings  of  religion  and  right 
living  were  bred  into  the  very  marrow  of  the  chil¬ 
dren.  And  this  was  the  practical  issue  in  the 

35 


36  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

weaver’s  case — he  felt  in  his  life  things  too  valuable 
to  be  misused,  too  fine  to  be  profaned,  and,  remem¬ 
bering  them,  he  held  a  high  opinion  of  himself. 

Every  admirable  character  in  history  can  be  in¬ 
terpreted  in  terms  of  such  lofty  self-respect.  If 
Joseph  resists  the  solicitations  of  impurity,  it  is  be¬ 
cause  he  thinks  that  his  honor  is  sacred.  If  the 
three  hundred  at  Thermopylae  withstand  with  re- 
memberable  courage  the  assault  of  the  Persians,  it  is 
because  they  think  that  their  loyalty  is  sacred.  If 
martyrs  have  gone  to  the  stake  rather  than  lie,  it 
is  because  they  have  believed  that  their  truth  is 
sacred.  Spinoza,  the  philosopher,  lived  long  ago 
in  Holland,  and  ground  and  polished  lenses  for  a 
living  while  he  thought  great  thoughts  of  God. 
Louis  XIV  offered  him  pension  and  patronage  if 
he  would  dedicate  even  one  book  to  His  Majesty. 
But  Spinoza  did  not  approve  of  Louis  XIV,  and 
so  he  continued  to  polish  lenses  and  to  live  with 
his  thoughts.  He  had  a  high  opinion  of  himself. 
A  prelate  in  New  Zealand  was  warned  by  the 
authorities  in  England  that  if  he  persisted  in  his 
course  they  would  cut  down  his  salary.  “You  can 
get  very  good  fish  here  in  the  bay,”  he  wrote  back, 
“and  I  know  a  place  in  the  woods  where  you  can 
dig  up  roots  that  you  can  eat.”  Plainly  he  had  a 
high  opinion  of  himself. 

No  training  of  children  matters  much  that  does 


A  HIGH  OPINION  OF  ONESELF  37 

not  put  at  the  center  of  their  lives  such  self-esteem. 
Rules  and  regulations  are  necessary,  admonitions 
and  rebukes,  and  all  the  fallible  machinery  by  which 
a  household  is  run.  But  the  one  abiding  service 
which  a  fine  home  can  do  the  children  is  to  put  deep 
into  the  grain  of  them  the  consciousness  that  in 
themselves  is  something  sacred,  rather  than  violate 
which  they  would  better  die.  “Taste,”  said  Ruskin, 
“is  the  only  morality.”  Understand  “taste”  deeply 
enough  and  that  is  true.  All  parents  know  that  the 
time  will  come  when  the  external  supports  which 
they  have  built  up  around  their  children  will  fall 
away  and  the  particular  admonitions  which  they 
have  given  will  be  forgotten.  But  perhaps  the 
home  will  have  given  the  children  something  deeper, 
a  sure  and  sensitive  taste  which  loves  good  and 
shrinks  from  evil,  which  feels  instinctively  that  life’s 
spiritual  values,  its  purities  and  fidelities  and  truths, 
are  too  fine  to  be  profaned. 

It  is  for  this  reason  that  the  mere  denunciation 
of  our  young  people,  thundering  against  them  and 
calling  down  upon  them  the  penalties  of  the  moral 
law,  does  so  little  good.  Undoubtedly  the  penalties 
of  the  moral  law  are  terrific,  and  our  modern 
cleverness  will  not  evade  them.  A  bullet  may  leap 
from  the  rifle’s  mouth  crying  “What  care  I  for  gravi¬ 
tation?  I  will  go  as  I  will!”  For  all  its  speed,  how¬ 
ever,  it  will  not  beat  out  gravitation  in  the  end. 


38  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

Gravitation  never  lets  go.  It  hangs  on  tremen¬ 
dously.  Sooner  or  later  that  bullet  will  come  down. 
So  our  moral  wildness  will  never  escape  the  moral 
law.  But  strenuous  insistence  on  that  fact  does  not 
cure  the  situation.  The  deeper  trouble  with  all  of 
us,  both  older  and  younger,  is  not  that  we  lack 
knowledge  of  external  penalties,  but  that  we  lack 
a  fine  sense  of  inward  sanctities.  If  a  violin  had 
been  made  in  the  first  place  by  Antonio  Stradivari 
himself  and  if  skilled  hands  had  played  upon  it  the 
compositions  of  the  masters,  any  cheap  endeavor 
to  make  it  hiccup  with  syncopated  jazz  would  be 
resented.  The  violin  would  be  ashamed.  That  quicks 
sense  of  possessing  in  ourselves  something  inwardly 
fine  that  must  not  be  desecrated  is  essential  to  great 
character.  It  is  one  of  the  supreme  gifts  that  any 
home  can  give  to  its  children.  It  is  generally  caught 
by  contagion,  not  taught  by  admonition.  It  is  in¬ 
stinctive  self-respect — the  resistance  of  a  man  who 
holds  a  high  opinion  of  himself  against  the  profana¬ 
tion  of  his  holy  things. 

Ex-President  Eliot,  of  Harvard,  says  that  the 
strongest  appeal  that  he  was  ever  able  to  bring  to 
bear  on  wayward  boys  consisted  in  making  clear  to 
them  how  much  they  had  been  sacrificed  for  and  how 
much  their  failure  would  mean  to  those  who  cared. 
If  we  seek  an  explanation  of  that  motive’s  power 
we  must  start  with  the  fact  that  when  anything 


A  HIGH  OPINION  OF  ONESELF  39 

is  sacrificed  for,  from  a  battle-flag  to  a  boy,  it  gains 
sacredness.  One  feels  that  it  ought  not  to  be  dese¬ 
crated.  Get  any  boy  vitally  to  recognize  that  he  is 
the  object  of  sacrifice  and  what  you  have  done  is 
to  lift  his  own  opinion  of  his  worth.  Every  man 
who  has  had  a  great  mother  understands  that  long 
after  her  special  words  have  been  forgotten  her 
abiding  influence  continues  in  an  immeasurable 
heightening  of  life’s  sacredness.  To  have  been  the 
object  of  such  love  is  to  become  too  valuable  to 
waste. 

Dr.  Eliot  really  was  appealing  to  the  motive  of 
the  Cross;  he  was  sending  those  boys  away  saying 
to  themselves,  whether  they  ever  put  it  into  words 
or  not,  “I  have  been  sacrificed  for,  and  my  life  is 
worth  too  much  to  throw  away.” 

All  great  teachers  and  all  great  parents  have 
relied  upon  that  method  of  producing  character. 
They  have  not  lifted  human  quality  primarily  by 
thundering  against  sin;  they  have  lifted  it  by 
heightening  the  positive  conception  of  life’s  dignity 
and  value.  Professor  Gilbert  Murray,  of  Oxford, 
says  that  once  he  took  up  a  copy  of  Macbeth  which 
had  belonged  to  Andrew  Bradley,  the  Shaksperean 
scholar,  and  he  read  in  it  a  scene  which  he  knew 
almost  by  heart  and  which  he  had  supposed  that 
he  understood.  But  he  adds  that  as  he  read  Brad¬ 
ley’s  penciled  notes  on  the  margin  he  discovered 


40  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


that  he  had  been  missing  about  half  a  dozen  points 
on  every  page.  The  spiritual  seers  have  had  that 
effect  upon  their  fellows;  they  have  disclosed  in 
the  familiar  passages  of  human  life  significant 
values  that  were  being  missed.  Because  of  their  in¬ 
sight  men  have  seen  that  life  is  finer  and  more 
meaningful  than  they  had  supposed.  To  have 
friends  whose  lives  we  can  elevate  or  depress  by 
our  influence  is  sacred.  To  be  entrusted  with  little 
children  is  sacred.  To  have  powers  by  which  we  can 
make  this  earth  a  more  decent  place  is  sacred.  To 
be  a  child  of  God  is  sacred.  And  honor,  honesty, 
truthfulness,  fidelity,  and  love  are  sacred.  Such  is 
the  insight  by  the  leverage  of  which  the  spiritual 
seers  have  lifted  men,  and  by  which  high-minded 
parents  have  trained  high-minded  children.  For 
when  any  one  vitally  believes  that  anything  is 
sacred  he  will  shrink  from  sacrilege. 

ii 

The  need  of  such  self-respect  in  modern  life  is  not 
far  to  seek.  There  used  to  be  a  bam  on  the  crest 
of  the  Chautauqua  hills  so  placed  that  its  ridge¬ 
pole  was  a  watershed  between  two  great  river  sys¬ 
tems.  For  the  drops  of  rain  which  fell  upon  one 
side  flowed  into  Lake  Erie  and  so  out,  by  the  St. 
Lawrence  River,  into  the  Atlantic,  and  the  drops 


A  HIGH  OPINION  OF  ONESELF  41 


which  fell  upon  the  other  side  flowed  into  Lake 
Chautauqua  and  so  out,  by  the  Ohio  River  and  the 
Mississippi,  to  the  Gulf  of  Mexico.  With  what  fas¬ 
cination  we  boys  used  to  watch  it  rain  on  that  roof 
and  to  wonder  at  the  far-sundered  destinies  of  the 
drops  which  fell  so  near  together  ! 

Such  a  decisive  element  in  character  is  this  mat¬ 
ter  of  self-respect.  To  have  it  in  good  working 
order  and  at  one’s  disposal  on  short  notice  is  gen¬ 
erally  the  determining  factor  in  a  man’s  life.  When 
a  ship  goes  down  at  sea  there  is  no  time  to  argue 
out  the  pros  and  cons  of  right  action.  If  a  man  lets 
women  and  children  go  first  it  is  because  something 
in  him,  call  it  what  you  will,  a  sense  of  honor,  self- 
respect,  rises  up  imperatively  to  decide  the  matter 
without  debate.  Only  those  men  get  through  life 
unscathed  by  dishonor  in  whom  self-respect  is 
ingrained. 

^The  sin  of  age  is  cool,  shrewd,  calculating;  the 
sin  of  youth  is  passionate,  tumultuous  and  swift. 
It  is  committed  with  headlong  impetuosity.  The  life 
is  smirched,  defiled,  it  may  be  ruined,  before  there 
has  been  time  to  think.  Temptations  swoop  down 
on  youth  with  stormy  suddenness.  Restraints  like 
fear  of  consequence  are  swept  aside.  So  far  as  ill 
result  is  concerned,  the  youth  longs  to  run  the 
Jolly  Roger  to  the  masthead  and  sail  in.  Only  one 
thing  will  save  him  from  disaster.  It  may  be  that 


42  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

there  is  in  him  a  sense  of  honor,  a  quick  conscious¬ 
ness  of  something  which  must  not  be  desecrated. 
All  the  fine  influences  that  have  played  upon  his 
life  have  helped  to  put  it  there.  His  home,  his  best 
friends,  his  hours  of  serious  thought  and  reading, 
his  worship  in  the  church,  his  inward  prayers — such 
influences  have  deposited  in  him  this  saving  core 
of  character.  Driven  back  he  may  be  through  all 
his  outward  defenses,  but  his  victory  lies  at  last 
in  that  inextinguishable  resentment  against  sacri¬ 
lege  which  rises  up  even  at  the  last  moment  to  cry 
“No1,  before  God — not  that!” 

One  of  the  finest  expressions  of  this  spirit  ever 
given  us  is  contained  in  a  single  verse  of  Tenny¬ 
son’s  ascription  to  the  Queen:  “0  Loyal  to  the 
royal  in  thyself.”  All  greatness  in  character  is  as¬ 
sociated  with  that.  As  one  considers  its  implica¬ 
tions  one  is  inclined  to  think  that  all  of  ethics  and 
an  important  part  of  religion  are  contained  in  it — 
“Loyal  to  the  royal  in  thyself.” 

hi 

/  One  field  where  this  test  of  character  has  clear 
application  is  the  relationship  between  the  sexes. 
The  modern  age  has  become  obsessed  by  the  idea 
that  the  cure  of  our  ills  is  to  be  found  in  the  spread 
of  biological  information.  Out  of  an  old-fashioned 


A  HIGH  OPINION  OF  ONESELF  43 

reticence  which,  while  not- afraid  to  call  a  spade  a 
spade,  did  by  common  consent  leave  some  spades 
undiscussed,  we  have  come  into  an  age  when  we 
discuss  everything  publicly,  not  to  say  blatantly. 
“If  only  our  young  people  were  properly  informed,” 
we  have  said,  “all  would  be  right.”  Well,  our  con¬ 
temporary  young  people  do  certainly  seem  to  be 
informed.  They  seem  to  know  everything  that 
there  is  to  know  on  the  matter  of  sex.  But  it  is 
an  open  question  how  much  solid  improvement  has 
come  in  consequence. 

This  is  no  plea  for  the  policy  of  hush.  Ignorance 
is  no  cure  for  anything.  God  at  creation  said  “Let 
there  be  light,”  and  he  has  never  created  anything 
since  without  that  introductory  word.  The  sunlight 
of  wholesome  knowledge  can  disperse  the  fogs  of 
morbid  curiosity  and  misinformation,  and  all 
movements  to  bring  that  about  are  salutary. 
Parents  who  do  not  themselves  take  this  respon¬ 
sibility  with  their  own  children  are  sinners  against 
society.  But  that  truth  is  no  excuse  for  what  is 
happening  today. 

A  supposedly  intelligent  woman  who  prides  her¬ 
self  on  her  progressiveness  went  to  see  a  drama  that 
would  have  tickled  Nero’s  fancy  to  a  T.  It  dragged 
the  mind  through  scenes  of  vice,  and  at  the  end, 
as  a  sop  to  decency,  made  the  sinner  suffer  for  his 
sins.  “Wonderful!”  said  the  woman.  “How  much 


44  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

good  that  must  be  doing!”  That  is  stark  nonsense. 
Must  we  learn  all  over  again  in  this  realm  what  so 
laboriously  we  have  had  to  learn  in  others?  Our 
fathers  used  to  witness  the  public  execution  of  crim¬ 
inals.  The  theory  was  that  the  sight  of  violent 
death  in  punishment  for  crime  would  teach  the 
people  a  lesson.  But  it  did  no  such  thing.  The 
penologists  learned  that  after  public  executions 
murders  and  crimes  of  violence  increased.  They 
discovered  that  “brutality  begets  brutality.”  In 
consequence,  we  keep  our  executions  behind  closed 
doors. 

So,  too,  it  is  arrant  imbecility  for  us  to  suppose 
that  our  unashamed  and  vociferous  sex  interest,  our 
sex  dramas,  sex  novels,  sex  films,  sex  lectures,  and 
sex  caricatures  of  psychoanalysis,  with  all  their  in¬ 
formation,  are  helping  to  cleanse  the  life  of  our 
youth.  Their  effect  is  not  cleansing  but  coarsening. 
They  do  not  waken  the  aspiration  for  purity;  they 
accustom  the  mind  to  impurity.  We  cannot  wash 
our  linen  clean  in  dirty  water.  1/ 

The  ultimate  protection  of  youth  against  un¬ 
cleanliness  lies  in  an  inbred  respect  for  life’s  sanc¬ 
tities.  A  mother  who  has  given  to  her  son  a  deep 
reverence  for  womanhood  has  rendered  to  his  pur¬ 
ity  the  fundamental  service.  A  church  that  has 
undergirdled  a  youth  with  the  positive  conscious¬ 
ness  that  his  life  is  sacred  has  conferred  the  indis- 


A  HIGH  OPINION  OF  ONESELF  45 

^—————————————1  .■■■■■■■—■■«— — — —  ■  ■  ■  MQ— < 

pensable  gift.  Often  in  matters  of  sex  this  respect 
for  life’s  sanctities  is  associated  with  a  sense  of 
mystery,  fortunately  not  yet  dissipated  by  pestilen¬ 
tial  amateurs  trying  to  save  the  world  by  telling  all 
they  know.  Without  that  inward  gense  of  honor, 
no  information  matters;  with  it,  it  is  surprising 
what  admirable  results  previous  generations  with 
all  their  reticence  often  obtained. 

When  we  were  children  and  had  to  cross  a  creek 
on  a  single  log,  we  learned  a  trick  which  stood  us 
in  good  stead.  If  we  looked  down  at  the  swirling 
water  underneath,  the  chances  were  more  than  even 
that  we  would  fall  in.  But  if  we  picked  out  a  tree 
upon  the  other  bank  and  held  our  heads  up  to  look 
at  it  we  could  walk  across.  The  trouble  with  our 
generation’s  present  method  of  dealing  with  the 
sex  problem  lies  in  the  endlessly  repeated  call  to 
look  down.  “Look  down,”  cry  the  books.  “Con¬ 
sider  how  appalling  impurity  is!”  “Look  down,” 
cry  the  plays.  “Consider  the  terrible  aftermath  of 
impurity!”  “Look  down,”  cry  the  reformers.  “See 
the  horrible  pit  of  impurity  into  which  you  are 
likely  to  fall!”  Is  it  not  about  time  that  tune 
should  be  changed?  How  would  it  be  if  more 
voices  were  raised  telling  the  young  people  to 
look  up? 

The  positive  ideal  of  a  clean  life  that  holds  a  high 
opinion  of  itself  is  youth’s  ultimate  protection. 


46  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

Phillips  Brooks  put  it  once  in  unforge  table 
words:  “To  keep  clear  of  concealment,  to  keep  clear 
of  the  need  of  concealment,  to  do  nothing  which 
he  might  not  do  out  on  the  middle  of  Boston  Com¬ 
mon  at  noon-day, — I  cannot  say  how  more  and 
more  that  seems  to  me  to  be  the  glory  of  a  young 
man’s  life.  It  is  an  awful  hour  when  the  first  neces¬ 
sity  of  hiding  anything  comes.  .  .  .  Put  off  that 
day  as  long  as  possible.  Put  it  off  forever  if  you 
can.” 

Self-respect  like  this  establishes  an  instinctive 
quarantine  in  the  mind.  A  self-respecting  man,  like 
a  self-respecting  country,  will  not  allow  plagues  and 
pestilences  to  enter  his  ports.  A  ship  may  be  very 
popular,  with  folk  of  prestige  and  wealth  aboard  to 
increase  its  credit,  but  if  it  carries  pestilence  it  has 
to  stop.  Such  a  quarantine  of  the  mind  is  inevi¬ 
tably  set  up  in  a  man  who  holds  a 'high  opinion  of 
himself,  and  nothing  is  more  needed  today  among 
our  youth. 

iv 

One  reason  why  it  is  of  vital  concern  to  every 
citizen,  whatever  his  special  form  of  religious  belief, 
that  real  religion  should  flourish  in  the  common¬ 
wealth  is  that  religion  has  always  taught  men  thus 
to  respect  life’s  sanctities.  Go  into  any  land  in  any 
generation,  and  religion  has  always  been  saying 


A  HIGH  OPINION  OF  ONESELF  47 

about  something,  “This  must  not  be  desecrated.” 
To  be  sure,  it  may  have  been  only  a  painted  stick, 
a  hideous  idol,  an  altar  red  with  sacrificial  blood. 
Yet  even  in  its  crude  and  cruel  forms  religion  has 
been  doing  humanity  this  service :  it  has  kept  alive 
the  consciousness  of  something  in  human  life  which 
must  not  be  violated.  Imagine  some  scene  where 
Roman  armies  fall  upon  a  little  country,  sure  in 
time  to  be  crushed  under  the  heel  of  the  conqueror. 
See  the  feeble  band  of  desperate  men  and  women  as 
they  leave  their  city  walls  to  the  invader,  give  up 
their  homes  and  hearths  and  draw  in  about  their 
temple  and  their  shrine.  As  they  fall  in  defense  of 
their  holy  place,  for  all  the  poor  form  of  their  de¬ 
votion,  there  is  this  element  of  sublimity:  they  do 
believe  that  something  in  life  is  so  sacred  that  a 
man  would  better  die  than  have  it  violated. 

No  civilization  will  long  survive  the  loss  of  that 
conviction.  When  that  conviction  appears  in  its 
finest  form,  it  lifts  life  to  its  highest  levels.  One 
of  the  distinctive  marks  of  Christianity  at  its  best 
is  that  it  teaches  men  to  hold  a  very  lofty  opinion 
of  themselves.  They  are  children  of  God,  made  in 
his  image,  destined  for  his  character.  Not  an  out¬ 
ward  temple,  but  the  inward  shrine  of  man’s  per¬ 
sonality  with  all  its  possibilities  and  powers  is  seen 
to  be  infinitely  sacred.  Men  say  about  themselves 
things  the  like  of  which  they  never  had  said  before 


48  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


— “now  are  we  children  of  God,  and  it  is  not  yet 
made  manifest  what  we  shall  be.”  Men  even  dare 
to  think  that  because  their  spiritual  lives  are  the 
offspring  of  the  Eternal  Spirit,  they  are  of  essential 
importance  in  his  eyes  and  have,  therefore,  illim¬ 
itable  possibilities  and  a  glorious  destiny.  One 
central  effect  of  religion  at  its  best  has  been  im¬ 
measurably  to  increase  man’s  self-respect. 

If  one  protests,  upon  the  contrary,  that  Chris¬ 
tianity  has  often  depressed  man’s  view  of  himself, 
insisting  terribly  on  his  sinfulness  and  depravity, 
the  answer  is  plain.  Only  when  you  start  by  ap¬ 
preciating  the  high  value  of  anything  are  you  likely 
with  any  energy  to  deplore  its  prostitution.  It  is 
said  that  a  servant  once  beat  the  household  rugs 
with  the  master’s  flute.  She  doubtless  was  well 
content  with  the  performance,  but  he  was  not.  He 
knew  what  a  flute  was  for.  He  raged  at  its  misuse. 
So  Christianity,  loftily  estimating  what  human  per¬ 
sonality  was  meant  to  be,  has  raged  against  sin, 
has  said  terrific  things  about  man’s  wickedness,  not 
because  it  held  a  low  opinion  of  him,  but  because  it 
held  a  high  opinion. 

One  of  the  most  important  intellectual  and  prac¬ 
tical  problems  of  our  time  is  the  maintenance  of 
this  high  estimate  of  the  worth  and  greatness  of 
human  life  against  the  devastating  effects  of  a 
materialistic  philosophy.  The  final  result  of  mate- 


A  HIGH  OPINION  OF  ONESELF  49 

rialism  is  to  strip  all  sanctity  from  life,  reduce 
everything  to  the  activity  of  physical  atoms,  make 
human  spirits  helpless  cogs  in  a  gigantic  mechanism, 
and  in  the  end  to  present  a  picture  of  humanity 
born  of  the  dust,  doomed  to  the  dust,  without  spir¬ 
itual  origin,  spiritual  meaning,  or  spiritual  destiny. 
That  undercuts  everything  that  is  excellent  and 
august  and  beautiful  in  humanity.  Many  people 
treat  religion  as  a  negligible  matter.  The  fact  is 
that  religion  is  fighting  the  battle  for  something 
indispensable  to  human  welfare :  the  sense  of  some¬ 
thing  sacred  here  which  must  not  be  profaned. 

v 

Approaching  religion  from  this  angle,  one  sees 
that  almost  everybody  has  a  religion  of  some  sort. 
There  are  only  a  few  lives  without  a  spot  of  sacred¬ 
ness  somewhere.  A  stranger  may  for  hours  wander 
about  some  old  and  poor  quarter  of  London,  peer¬ 
ing  into  the  show  windows,  casually  interested  in 
the  traffic  of  the  street,  wondering  at  the  hurly- 
burly  of  the  city,  and  then,  when  least  expecting  it, 
may  light  upon  some  church  so  hidden  that  one 
easily  could  miss  it.  Slipping  in,  he  will  find  an 
ancient  shrine  where  kings  have  worshiped  and 
martyrs  lie  buried,  with  glorious  old  windows 
where  the  light  shines  through  the  scenes  of  the 


50  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

Savior’s  passion.  So  in  the  heart  of  many  a  man, 
overtopped  and  smothered  by  “business,”  unsus¬ 
pected  by  his  chance  acquaintances,  is  to  be  found 
a  hidden  shrine.  He  is  not  so  utterly  irreligious  as 
he  sometimes  seems.  There  is  something  in  his  life 
concerning  which,  at  least  at  times,  he  feels  a 
profound  sense  of  sacredness. 

Moreover,  this  hidden  shrine,  which  often  seems 
uninfluential,  sometimes  asserts  itself  with  over¬ 
whelming  power.  Why  is  it  so  hard  to  sin?  Why, 
when  the  lower  passions  gain  control,  can  we  not 
give  them  vent  and  be  at  peace  as  are  the  beasts? 
They  are  not  ashamed.  They  do  not  do  what  we 
do — go  around  for  years  with  dark  memories  in 
our  hearts  at  the  thought  of  which  we  cringe  and 
yet  to  which  with  fascinated  reminiscence  our 
minds  miserably  return.  Here  is  a  man  who  has 
vilely  wronged  his  family  in  such  a  way  that  he 
can  never  be  found  out;  yet  he  brings  the  family 
to  the  minister’s  confessional  and  there  pours  out 
the  story  of  his  guilt.  His  hidden  sanctities  have 
risen  in  revolt.  The  temple  of  the  living  God  in 
him  has  cried  out  against  its  desecration.  For  the 
sense  of  sin  is  the  sense  of  sacrilege. 

Indeed,  anyone  who  starts  by  holding  a  high 
opinion  of  himself  will  certainly  end  by  being 
ashamed  of  himself.  Self-esteem  and  self-conceit 
are  opposites.  When  a  man  thinks  loftily  of  his 


A  HIGH  OPINION  OF  ONESELF  51 

life’s  meaning  he  is  hard  to  satisfy.  The  real  reason 
why  so  many  people  think  too  much  of  themselves 
is  that  they  do  not  think  enough  of  themselves. 

Few  things  are  more  important  in  our  civiliza¬ 
tion  than  churches  which  worthily  and  intelligently 
will  fulfill  this  inner  function  of  religion,  which  will 
beget  and  develop  in  men  a  controlling  sense  of 
life’s  sanctities. 

Indeed,  this  is  indispensable  not  only  to  indi¬ 
vidual  quality  but  to  social  reform.  Every  great 
moral  campaign  in  history  has  been  a  protest 
against  sacrilege.  This  is  true  of  the  crusades. 
When  those  knights  headed  for  the  Holy  Land  on 
a  campaign  that  would  cost  the  lives  of  so  many 
of  them,  it  was  because  they  felt  that  something  on 
earth,  even  though  only  an  empty  sepulcher  in 
Palestine,  was  sacred  and  must  not  be  desecrated. 
So,  too,  the  driving  power  of  all  modern  social 
movements  is  resentment  against  sacrilege.  Child 
labor  is  sacrilege,  for  little  children  are  holy  and 
ought  not  to  be  ground  up  in  our  industrial  order. 
War  is  sacrilege,  for  the  personalities  of  men  and 
women,  boys  and  girls  are  sacred,  and  war  de¬ 
bauches  them.  The  liquor  traffic  is  sacrilege,  for  it 
seeks  profit  from  the  damnation  of  human  souls. 
Twelve-hour  shifts  in  industry  and  inadequate  com¬ 
pensation  and  indecent  conditions  of  living  are  sac¬ 
rilege,  for  they  wrong  human  personality. 


52 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


One  often  hears  it  said  that  religion  has  no  busi¬ 
ness  to  try  to  decide  economic  and  international 
questions.  That  statement  can  be  so  interpreted 
as  to  be  true.  But  one  thing  is  the  business  of 
religion ;  it  always  has  been  the  business  of  religion 
— to  lay  its  hands  upon  life’s  holy  places  and  insist 
that  they  shall  not  be  violated.  The  ministers  of 
religion  used  to  emphasize  the  sanctity  of  temples, 
shrines,  the  bones  of  saints,  and  holy  relics.  Now, 
however,  religion  will  lay  her  hands  on  the  real 
sanctity — human  personality — and  will  fight  with 
all  the  fierceness  of  the  crusaders  against  its 
profanation. 

This,  then,  is  the  conclusion  of  the  matter:  life 
can  be  either  consecration  or  desecration,  and  no 
test  of  character  goes  much  deeper  than  the  deci¬ 
sion  as  to  which  of  these  two  it  shall  be. 


Seeing  the  Invisible 


I 

NYONE  who  is  to  live  finely  must  have 
the  ability  to  see  in  life  something  more 
than  its  prosaic  elements.  Riding  on  a 
New  York  bus  recently  I  watched  a  girl 
with  a  brand-new  diamond  ring  on  the  third  finger 
of  her  left  hand.  Altogether  unconscious  of  any¬ 
body  or  anything  except  her  own  happiness,  she 
sat  quietly  looking  at  it.  Now,  I  know  what  a  dia¬ 
mond  is  in  prosaic,  scientific  terms,  because  I  went 
home  and  looked  it  up.  A  diamond  is  a  form  of 
crystallized  carbon  in  which  every  carbon  atom  is 
“symmetrically  surrounded  by  four  other  carbon 
atoms,  arranged  at  the  corners  of  a  tetrahedron  in 
such  manner  that  the  whole  crystal  is  one  contin¬ 
uous  molecule.”  That  is  a  diamond.  But  I  should 
not  consider  it  particularly  worth  while  to  disturb 
that  young  girl’s  thoughts  by  telling  her  that.  She 
was  seeing  in  that  diamond  something  that  all  the 

scientists  who  ever  drew  diagrams  of  carbon  atoms 

53 


54  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

well  might  envy.  She  was  seeing  the  invisible. 
The  diamond  was  to  her  a  sacrament  and  symbol 
of  unseen  reality. 

No  man  is  the  whole  of  himself  until  he  has  de¬ 
veloped  this  capacity  to  see  something  in  life  be¬ 
sides  its  prose.  We  can,  to  be  sure,  put  into  prose 
our  business  letters,  the  daily  news,  the  round  of 
family  gossip,  the  quotations  of  the  stock  exchange; 
the  details  of  factual  experience  can  be  set  in  bare, 
plain  prose.  But  no  one  should  suppose  that  this 
represents  the  full  truth  about  anything.  If  one 
would  know  the  truth  about  an  eagle,  he  may  con¬ 
sult  a  scientific  textbook  and  learn  the  ornitho¬ 
logical  details.  They  will  be  correct,  but  they  will 
not  be  adequate  to  describe  an  eagle.  Let  Tenny¬ 
son,  for  example,  supply  some  of  the  lack: 

He  clasps  the  crag  with  crooked  hands; 

Close  to  the  sun  in  lonely  lands , 

Ringed  with  the  azure  world,  he  stands. 

The  wrinkled  sea  beneath  him  crawls; 

He  watches  from  his  mountain  walls , 

And  like  a  thunderbolt  he  falls. 

That  is  an  eagle! 

Any  man's  life  has  been  a  failure  when  its  whole 
story  can  be  told  in  prosaic,  indicative  sentences., 
The  deepest  and  finest  experiences  of  humankind 
have  always  been  expressed  in  poetry,  bodied  forth 


SEEING  THE  INVISIBLE 


55 

in  pictures,  symbolized  in  imagination,  set  to  music 
and  sung.  All  of  Christmas  could  not  be  expressed 
without  evergreen  trees,  holly,  mistletoe,  angels, 
carols  and  Santa  Claus.  Most  of  us  love  great  music 
because  it  says  things  which  we  feel  but  cannot  tell. 
Gabrilowitch  and  Hofmann,  Elman  and  Kreisler 
make  articulate  what  we  experience  but  cannot  say. 
The  florists’  windows  tell  the  truth:  some  things 
must  be  said  with  flowers. 

People  doubtless  differ  temperamentally  in  their 
sensitiveness  to  these  nonprosaic  elements  in  expe¬ 
rience.  But  for  all  that,  the  degree  to  which  a  man 
is  sensitive  to  them  is  one  of  the  tests  of  his  charac¬ 
ter.  Indbed,  in  an  age  when  streiluousness  seems  to 
many  a  sufficient  solution  of  man’s  problems,  few 
things  need  much  more  to  be  stressed.  Even  our 
modern  Christianity,  instead  of  being  an  endeavor 
after  the  pure  heart  that  sees  God,  has  become 
largely  a  gospel  of  “Wake  up  and  go  to  work!” — 
which  is  doubtless  a  needed  emphasis,  but  which 
alone  is  pitiably  inadequate.  There  is  such  a  thing 
as  being  overstrenuous,  so  restlessly  wakeful  that 
one  loses  vision. 

If  ever  a  man  has  had  insomnia,  has  courted  re¬ 
laxation  as  a  lover  courts  a  maiden  and  has  been 
unable  to  win  it,  has  chased  a  quiet  mind  as  boys 
chase  thistledown  upon  the  wind  just  beyond  their 
straining  reach,  has  sought  for  the  grace  of  an  hour’s 


56  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

sleep  as  men  pray  for  victory  when  they  fight,  he 
knows  that,  while  strenuousness  may  be  the  fore¬ 
ground  of  life,  rest  is  the  background,  and  that, 
lacking  it,  nothing  else  matters.  As  one  watches  the 
throngs  of  our  never-quiet  cities,  one  can  see  that 
the  trouble  with  many  of  us  is  spiritual  insomnia. 
Like  the  first  dove  from  Noah’s  ark,  we  keep  flying 
above  the  turbulent  and  swirling  waters  because 
there  is  no  place  to  stop.  We  have  overdeveloped 
our  practical  strenuousness;  we  have  underdevel¬ 
oped  our  responsiveness  to  life’s  healing,  cleansing, 
redeeming  spiritualities. 


ii 

The  gist  of  the  matter  lies  in  man’s  ability  to  turn 
his  thoughts  in  three  directions — down,  out,  and  up. 
He  can  look  down  on  things  and  animals  beneath 
him  in  the  scale  of  life;  he  can  look  out  at  com¬ 
rades  of  his  own  humankind,  upon  a  level  with 
him;  but  he  has  also  this  other  faculty  from  which 
the  finest  elements  in  human  life  have  sprung — 
he  can  look  up.  Man’s  distinction  is  that  he  can  ad¬ 
mire,  adore;  that  he  is  aware  of  something  or 
Someone  above  him,  possessing  the  right  to  his  de¬ 
vout  allegiance;  that  he  can  know  reverence,  which 
Shakspere  rightly  called  “that  Angell  of  the  world.” 

As  every  minister  knows,  into  whose  confessional 


SEEING  THE  INVISIBLE  57 


come  endless  stories  from  real  life,  the  trouble  with 
multitudes  of  people  is  that  they  try  to  live  upon 
the  first  two  capacities  without  the  third.  They  try 
to  master  the  elements  which  lie  below  them;  they 
try  to  live  reasonably  with  the  companions  who  are 
about  them.  They  forget  that  the  glory  of  life 
comes  not  from  the  things  which  we  command,  but 
from  the  things  which  we  reverence;  not  from  the 
lowest  elements  which  serve  us,  but  from  the 
Highest  whom  we  serve. 

One  reads  the  popular  books  about  success  and 
continually  misses  this  primary  matter,  without 
the  recognition  of  which  all  success  is  cheap  and 
vulgar.  We  are  told  to  grit  our  teeth  and  tackle  the 
mastery  of  life’s  raw  materials ;  we  are  told  to  learn 
cooperation  with  our  fellows;  but  we  are  not  told 
what  many  of  us  need  most  to  learn,  that  respon¬ 
siveness  to  what  is  above  us  is  the  soul  of  the 
whole  business.  You  can  always  tell  a  man’s  qual¬ 
ity  by  noting  the  things  to  which  he  is  alive ;  people 
constantly  reveal  their  spiritual  rank  by  their  re¬ 
sponsiveness.  Real  music  does  not  stir  them;  some 
cheap  and  tinsel  tune  does.  The  glories  of  God’s 
out-of-doors  awaken  no  response,  but  they  are  keen 
for  the  hectic  excitement  of  a  gambler’s  chances 
around  tables  undeserted  all  day  long.  The  bene¬ 
dictions  of  a  pure  heart  seem  tame  to  them;  they 
love  the  perversions  of  a  vicious  life.  Speak  to 


58  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

them  of  great  books,  and  they  are  dull;  tell  them 
the  last  unwholesome  jest,  and  they  are  all  anima¬ 
tion.  They  are  alive  to  the  low;  they  are  dead  to 
the  high. 

Now,  the  capacity  of  response  is  not  alone  the 
test  of  our  quality;  it  is  the  innermost  secret  of 
spiritual  wealth.  When  a  man  responds  to  a  great 
book  he  has  not  simply  revealed  himself;  he  has 
enriched  himself.  Only  responsiveness  can  open 
the  door  of  the  heart  to  anything.  This  is  the 
reason  why  an  unresponsive  child  is  the  despair  of 
a  home.  We  can  get  along  with  almost  anything 
except  that.  Passionate  temper  in  a  child  is  try¬ 
ing,  but  it  is  promising;  what  may  not  be  done  with 
a  tempestuous  boy  when  his  energy  has  been  har¬ 
nessed  and  controlled?  Lying  in  a  child  is  danger¬ 
ous;  yet  what  may  not  be  done  with  an  imagi¬ 
native  lad  who  with  difficulty  distinguishes  fact  from 
fancy?  Selfishness  is  a  root  of  evil;  but  a  child 
ambitious  to  possess  and  to  surpass  is  raw  material 
for  strong  living.  All  such  faults  are  perversions 
of  powers  fundamentally  good;  but  unresponsive 
sullenness — not  a  redeeming  word  can  be  said  for 
that;  it  shuts  the  doors  against  everything.  Dante, 
that  most  acute  and  penetrating  analyzer  of  sin, 
did  not  put  in  the  pit  of  his  hell  folk  whose  iniquity 
had  sprung  from  passion.  The  pit  of  his  hell  was 
filled  with  sullen,  ungrateful  men,  frozen  in  ice. 


SEEING  THE  INVISIBLE  59 


No  one  intelligently  can  evade  this  question  of 
man’s  power  responsively  to  look  up  to  the  Highest, 
by  calling  it  an  impractical  matter.  The  most  pow¬ 
erful  living  in  history  has  been  associated  with  it. 
It  wras  a  strange  thing  to  hear  the  Americans  in 
France  during  the  war  singing  “Joan  of  Arc,  they 
are  calling  you.”  Joan  of  Arc  lived  five  hundred 
years  ago.  She  was  only  sixteen  years  old  when  she 
began  her  great  career;  she  knew-  nothing  about 
our  powerful  engines  of  battle,  but  rode  a  horse  and 
wielded  a  single  sword.  Yet,  half  a  millennium 
afterward,  our  American  men  were  singing  “Joan 
of  Arc,  they  are  calling  you.”  The  reason  is  not  far 
to  seek:  Joan  of  Arc  lived  with  the  invisible;  she 
had  angels  so  real  that  she  gave  names  to  them — 
St.  Catherine  and  St.  Margaret — angels  that  bodied 
forth  for  her  the  reality  and  nearness  and  guidance 
of  the  spiritual  world;  and  they  carried  her  a  long, 
long  way  and  made  her  name  a  flame  of  fire  until 
this  day. 

Nobody  has  ever  counted  in  this  world  without 
“angels,”  Responsiveness  to  the  Unseen  is  the  great 
driving  power  for  strong  living.  The  most  matter- 
of-fact  man  among  us  may  well  recall  that  we  num¬ 
ber  our  years  from  the  birth  of  One  from  the  gravi¬ 
tation  of  whose  life  we  no  more  can  escape  than  the 
tides  from  the  moon,  because  the  Invisible  was  real 
to  him  and  he  knew  God. 


60  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


ill 

This  hunger  for  assurance  about  the  reality  and 
friendliness  of  the  Unseen  is  the  explanation  of  the 
strange  custom  of  going  to  church.  The  question 
why  folk  do  not  go  to  church  has  been  often  dis¬ 
cussed.  There  is  nothing  modern  in  the  query. 
In  1572,  at  the  opening  of  Parliament,  Sir  Nicholas 
Bacon  raised  the  inquiry  “why  the  common  people 
in  this  country  universally  come  so  seldom  to 
Common  Prayer  and  Divine  Service.”  The  real 
question,  however,  is  the  opposite  of  that:  why 
does  anybody  ever  go  to  church  at  all?  Few  cus¬ 
toms  are  more  widespread  and  more  persistent  than 
church-going,  and  it  seldom  has  been  more  common 
than  in  the  days  since  religion  became  voluntary. 
There  must  be  something  ingrained  in  human 
nature  to  which  so  strange  a  habit  makes  appeal. 
Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  once  said  that  there  was  in 
the  corner  of  his  heart  a  plant  called  reverence 
which  needed  watering  about  once  a  week. 

Religious  worship  rests  back  upon  this  fact  that 
man,  just  because  he  is  man,  cannot  help  looking 
up.  “The  soul  can  never  rest  in  things  beneath 
itself.”  It  is  not  theology  that  folk  come  to  seek; 
it  is  satisfaction  for  the  upreach  of  their  lives. 
Theology,  with  its  endless  subdivisions  of  fine 


SEEING  THE  INVISIBLE 


61 


points,  makes  much  less  difference  than  some  folk 
think. 

Said  the  guide  at  the  Sorbonne  in  Paris:  “This 
is  the  hall  where  the  doctors  of  divinity  have  dis¬ 
puted  for  four  hundred  years.” 

“Indeed!”  said  the  visitor.  “And  pray,  what  have 
they  settled?” 

Theology,  like  a  telescope,  is  made  simply  to  help 
people  see,  and  like  a  telescope  it  is  meant  to  be 
looked  through  and  not  looked  at.  An  old-fashioned 
preacher  goes  into  the  pulpit  with  an  old-fashioned 
theology.  Well,  Copernicus  and  Galileo  and  Kepler 
had  old-fashioned  telescopes;  this  modern  uni¬ 
verse  was  first  opened  up  by  men  with  instruments 
now  out  of  date.  If  that  preacher,  instead  of  talk¬ 
ing  about  his  theology,  really  uses  it,  if  he  says 
“Look  with  me  for  a  few  moments  at  the  Eternal,” 
the  people  will  get  what  they  came  for,  will  thank 
God,  take  courage,  and  go  out  to  live  with  a  new 
sense  of  the  reality  of  the  Unseen.  Moreover,  the 
next  Sunday  a  liberal  preacher  with  a  new  theology 
can  preach  in  the  same  pulpit  with  the  same  result. 

Only,  we  liberal  preachers  are  too  often  tempted 
to  go  into  our  pulpits  with  our  newT-fashioned  in¬ 
struments,  saying:  “See  my  telescope.  It  is  the 
latest  model.  There  is  no  new-fangled  device  that 
is  not  on  it — or  if  you  can  suggest  one  I  will  get  it.” 

One  can  almost  hear  the  people  in  the  pews  re- 


62 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


acting  to  that  sort  of  preaching.  “In  heaven’s 
name,”  they  say,  “why  advertise  so  loudly  the  date 
of  your  telescope?  We  are  plain  people,  very  busy. 
We  have  little  time  to  spend  going  to  church.  But 
if,  through  any  telescope  you  chance  to  have,  you 
could  give  us  a  reassuring  glimpse  of  the  Eternal 
before  we  go  into  another  week,  that  would  help. 
‘Show  us  the  Father,  and  it  sufficeth  us.’  ” 

This  does  not  mean  that  theological  clarity  and 
reasonableness  are  not  important — they  are  as  im¬ 
portant  as  good  telescopes — but  it  does  mean  that 
the  elemental  hunger  which  keeps  driving  people  to 
religion,  no  matter  in  what  intellectual  terms  it  is 
served,  is  not  theological  passion  at  all,  but  spiritual 
need  to  be  reassured  about  the  reality  and  good 
will  of  the  Unseen. 

For  materialism  is  doing  its  best  to  convince  man¬ 
kind  that  the  Unseen  is  not  real.  Yet  one  might 
as  well  take  a  fresco  of  Michelangelo  and  let  the 
physical  sciences  explain  it  all,  reducing  every 
glorious  effect  to  physical  atoms.  It  seems  a  simple 
matter  thus  to  reduce  the  qualitative  to  the  quanti¬ 
tative,  to  analyze  the  quantitative  into  its  constit¬ 
uent  elements  and  to  state  their  laws,  until  a 
fresco  in  the  presence  of  which  multitudes  have 
prayed  is  presented  in  a  chemical  formula.  It  is 
simple — but  it  is  too  simple.  One  listens  in  the  end 
to  a  man  like  Sir  Edward  Burne-Jones,  “There’s  a 


SEEING  THE  INVISIBLE  63 

lump  of  greasy  pigment/’  says  he,  “at  the  end  of 
Michelangelo’s  hog-bristle  brush,  and  by  the  time 
it  has  been  laid  on  the  stucco  there  is  something 
there  that  all  men  with  eyes  recognize  as  divine.” 
Greasy  pigment,  hog-bristle  brush,  and  stucco — 
nobody  doubts  that  they  are  involved  in  the  pic¬ 
ture,  but  they  do  not  make  the  picture.  Some¬ 
thing  else  is  there,  even  if  it  cannot  be  caught  in 
test  tubes  or  weighed  in  scales.  Creative  mind  may 
be  mysterious,  but  it  is  real. 

According  to  a  fable  said  to  have  come  from 
Denmark,  a  spider  once  slid  down  a  single  filament 
of  web  from  the  lofty  rafters  of  a  barn  and  estab¬ 
lished  himself  upon  a  lower  level.  There  he  spread 
his  web,  caught  flies,  grew  sleek  and  prospered. 
One  day,  wandering  about  his  premises,  he  saw 
the  thread  that  stretched  up  into  the  unseen  above 
him.  “What  is  that  for?”  he  said,  and  snapped  it — 
and  all  his  web  collapsed. 

A  good  deal  of  man’s  spiritual  history  is  con¬ 
densed  into  that  fable.  Unless  we  can  keep  our 
modern  materialists  from  breaking  our  connections 
with  the  Unseen  above  us,  some  more  of  man’s 
spiritual  history  will  prove  the  fable  true. 

IV 

The  only  way  in  which  many  impatient  minds 
among  us  can  maintain  respect  for  the  Church  and 


64  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

willingness  to  support  it  is  by  constantly  remember¬ 
ing  that  behind  all  her  foibles  and  failures  she 
does  strive  to  meet  this  central  need  of  human  life. 
Say  “church”  to  some  people,  and  they  think  at 
once  of  Baptist,  Methodist,  Congregational,  Presby¬ 
terian,  Episcopalian  churches,  with  their  competi¬ 
tions,  inadequacies,  and  faults.  “Church”  has  no 
other  significance  to  some,  and  often  to  such  the 
church  is  a  butt  of  ridicule.  But  suppose  that  any 
other  organized  form  of  human  activity  were 
treated  so.  If  every  time  a  man  thought  of  repre¬ 
sentative  government  he  had  nothing  in  his  mind 
except  the  exhibitions  of  it  which  many  of  our 
cities,  states  and  nations  are  presenting,  would  he 
not  ridicule  that  too? 

It  is  said  that  Thomas  Carlyle  once  endeavored 
to  persuade  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson  on  a  visit  to 
England  that  there  really  is  a  personal  devil  and,  as 
a  last  resort,  having  exhausted  all  the  arguments 
that  he  could  lay  his  mind  to,  he  took  Emerson  to 
a  session  of  the  British  House  of  Commons  as  proof 
positive  that  the  devil  does  exist. 

Most  citizens  have  plenty  of  excuse  for  such 
Carlylean  moods  about  democratic  assemblies!. 
Yet  that  attitude  does  not  do  justice  to  representa¬ 
tive  government.  One  of  the  great  hours  in  his¬ 
tory  struck  when  mankind  ran  into  the  idea  that 
all  the  people  should  unite  in  making  laws,  which 


SEEING  THE  INVISIBLE  65 


then  all  the  people  would  obey.  Behind  our  piti¬ 
fully  fallible  experiments  with  representative  gov¬ 
ernment  stands  the  Ideal,  worth  everything  our 
fathers  gave  for  it  and  all  that  we  can  give — the 
democratic  state. 

So,  behind  the  churches  stands  the  Church,  and 
the  Church  is  not  Anglican  nor  Methodist  nor 
Baptist  nor  Presbyterian.  The  Church  is  the  fel¬ 
lowship  of  souls  who  in  the  spirit  have  found  God. 
Sometimes  one  discovers  its  members  inside  the 
visible  churches  and  sometimes  out.  The  visible 
churches  are  the  fallible  endeavor  to  express  in  an 
institution,  limited  by  human  frailty,  the  need  of 
man  for  God  and  the  approach  of  God  to  man.  One 
sometimes  goes  home  from  hearing  a  great  sym¬ 
phony  and  with  his  fingers  on  the  window  pane 
drums  a  melody  that  he  remembers,  knowing  that 
it  is  a  poor  imitation  of  orchestral  richness  and  va¬ 
riety.  So  inadequate  the  visible  churches  often  are 
when  they  try  to  reproduce  the  meaning  of  the 
Church  Invisible.  One  may  turn  his  back  upon  the 
churches,  but  the  Church  is  another  matter. 

All  who  speak  truth  to  me  commissioned  are ; 

All  who  love  God  are  in  my  church  embraced. 

Not  that  I  have  no  sense  of  preference , 

None  deeper,  but  I  rather  love  to  draw, 

Even  here  on  earth,  on  toward  that  perfect  law, 

And  Heaven’s  fine  etiquette,  where  Who  and  Whence 


66 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


May  not  be  asked,  but  at  the  Wedding  Feast 

North  may  sit  down  with  South,  and  West  with  East. 

If  any  man  supposes  that  this  exaltation  of  the 
Church  Invisible  dispenses  him  from  thinking  that 
the  visible  churches  matter,  he  should  see  that 
what  we  have  been  saying  is  the  one  thing  that 
most  of  all  makes  them  matter.  The  institutions 
that  matter  most  on  earth,  like  law  courts  and  par¬ 
liaments  and  families  and  churches,  are  those  which 
are  endeavoring  amid  frailty  and  difficulty  to  ex¬ 
press  something  spiritual  and  eternal — justice  or 
democracy  or  love  or  faith — without  which  man 
cannot  live.  No  one  has  any  business  to  despise 
a  sincere  attempt  to  put  into  expression,  however 
faulty,  something  indispensable  to  man — and  sav¬ 
ing  relationship  with  the  Divine  is  indispensable 
to  man.  Point  out  to  some  of  us,  therefore,  the 
humblest,  narrowest,  most  struggling  church  to  be 
found,  and,  while  we  may  deplore  it,  we  shall  not 
despise  it.  We  shall  keep  thinking  of  what  it  is 
trying  to  say.  Insist,  if  one  will,  that  it  stammers 
and  stutters.  Yet  consider  what  it  is  trying  to  say. 
That  the  Unseen  is  real,  that  around  our  spiritual 
lives,  like  the  physical  universe  about  our  bodies, 
is  the  Spiritual  Life  from  whom  we  came,  by  whom 
we  are  sustained,  to  whom  we  go — the  Church  is 
trying  to  say  that  through  the  churches.  The 
fatherhood  of  God,  the  nearness  and  availability  of 


SEEING  THE  INVISIBLE 


67 

the  Spirit,  the  saviorhood  of  the  Divine  outpoured 
in  Christ,  the  purposefulness  of  creation,  the  coming 
victory  of  righteousness,  the  fulfillment  of  life 
through  love  and  service,  the  hope  of  life  eternal — 
such  things  the  Church  struggles  to  say  through  the 
churches. 

Indeed,  most  of  us  who  gratefully  count  ourselves 
members  of  the  Church  have  some  visible  and  local 
church  to  thank.  A  little  meeting  house  still  is 
standing  in  a  country  town  to  which  my  memory 
makes  frequent  pilgrimage.  It  was  a  small,  dilapi¬ 
dated  structure  when  I  was  a  boy;  it  never  has 
been  rich  or  prosperous;  it  preached  a  theology 
which  I  do  not  now  believe,  and  insisted  on  denom¬ 
inational  peculiarities  in  which  I  have  not  now  the 
slightest  interest.  But  one  day  in  a  pew  of  that 
church,  I  as  a  boy  caught  a  glimpse  of  the  vision 
glorious.  Every  man  has  shrines  to  which  his 
thankful  recollection  turns,  and  that  old  brick  meet¬ 
ing  house  is  one  of  mine,  for  there  I  moved  up 
through  the  church  visible  into  the  Church 
Invisible. 


v 

The  perennial  need  of  human  life  for  fresh  inva¬ 
sions  of  reverence  and  spiritual  insight  seems  clear. 
No  character  ever  comes  to  its  fulfillment  without 
that.  “I  was  common  clay,”  says  a  Persian  proverb, 


68  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

“until  roses  were  planted  in  me.”  As  for  our  social 
problem,  a  cynical  materialism  is  our  most  deadly 
foe.  During  the  war  a  European  paper  published 
a  poem  praising  the  four  elements  of  the  universe: 
earth,  water,  fire  and  air.  It  praised  the  earth  be¬ 
cause  we  can  dig  trenches  in  it,  the  water  because 
we  can  use  submarines  in  it,  fire  because  it  belches 
from  the  cannon’s  mouth,  air  because  from  it  bombs 
can  fall.  Spirituality  is  a  much  maligned  and  cari¬ 
catured  word;  it  often  is  made  to  mean,  even  by 
those  who  claim  it,  a  vapid  and  sentimental  piety, 
but  that  war  poem  is  a  picture  of  what  this  world 
without  real  spirituality  would  be. 

As  for  a  man’s  total  attitude  toward  life  and  its 
meaning,  the  Easter  time  is  a  reminder  of  the  ulti¬ 
mate  barrenness  of  existence  if  one  cannot  live  with 
the  Invisible,  for  everything  that  is  visible  is  tran¬ 
sient.  Our  individual  lives  in  all  their  outward  as¬ 
pects  pass  away.  The  great  groupings  of  individuals 
in  nations  rise  and  fall.  America,  France,  Britain 
— how  solid  and  secure  they  seem!  But  so  seemed 
Egypt,  Assyria,  Greece,  Rome,  until,  like  sand  houses 
built  by  children  on  the  shore,  rising  tides  erased 
them. 

So,  too,  the  successive  generations  of  humanity 
come  and  go.  They  fall  like  gigantic  snowstorms, 
multitudinous  in  flakes,  only  to  melt  and  disappear. 
At  least  forty  million  people  die  on  this  earth  every 


SEEING  THE  INVISIBLE  69 

year.  Every  three  years  more  inhabitants  of  the 
planet  pass  away  than  would  make  up  the  popula¬ 
tion  of  the  United  States.  If  someone  eighty  years 
old  is  reading  this  article,  over  three  billion  people 
have  died  since  he  was  born.  In  the  light  of  such 
facts,  the  beginning  of  Martineau’s  great  prayer  be¬ 
comes  meaningful:  “0  God,  .  .  .  before  whose  face 
the  generations  rise  and  pass  away.” 

Even  the  solar  system  and  the  stars  are  transient, 
and  to  talk  of  the  eternal  hills  is  folly.  Some  stars 
are  in  embryo,  being  born  out  of  whirling  nebulae; 
some  are  in  their  fierce  and  fiery  youth;  some,  like 
our  own  sun,  are  past  middle  age;  some  are  old  and 
soon  will  die.  Everything  visible  is  temporal — our 
bodies,  our  nations,  the  generations  of  mankind, 
the  very  stars  blown  like  bubbles  in  the  sky. 

One  need  not  be  surprised  then  to  find  many 
people  agreeing  with  the  naturalist  who  said:’  “In 
the  visible  world  the  Milky  Way  is  a  tiny  fragment. 
Within  this  fragment  the  solar  system  is  an  in¬ 
finitesimal  speck,  and  of  this  speck  our  planet  is  a 
microscopic  dot.  On  this  dot  tiny  lumps  of  impure 
carbon  and  water  crawl  about  for  a  few  years,  until 
they  dissolve  into  the  elements  of  which  they  are 
compounded.” 

Is  that  really  all? 

No  one  believes  any  more  that  the  physical  world 
is  chaos;  for  all  its  mysteries,  we  know  that  it  is 


70  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

an  orderly  system.  But  must  we  think  that  the 
moral  universe  is  a  chaos,  arising  without  cause, 
continuing  without  purpose,  making  us  without 
meaning  to,  lacking  any  use  for  us  now  that  we 
are  here,  and  snuffing  us  all  out  like  guttering 
candles  in  the  end?  That  is  not  simply  undesirable ; 
it  is  irrational.  There  is  no  sense  in  it.  One  does 
not  get  sense  into  his  life  until  he  gets  spiritual 
insight. 

Some  kinds  of  religion  do  not  matter  much.  But 
to  be  sure  that  something  more  is  here  than  acci¬ 
dental  collocations  of  atoms,  that  mind  is  the  maker 
of  the  universe,  purpose  at  the  heart  of  it,  love  un¬ 
derneath  it,  Providence  in  control  of  it,  victory 
ahead  of  it — to  be  sure  that 

What  is  excellent, 

As  God  lives,  is  permanent — 

that  does  matter.  To  say  with  Robert  Louis  Steven¬ 
son,  “I  believe  in  an  ultimate  decency  of  things;  ay, 
and  if  I  woke  in  hell,  should  still  believe  it” — that 
matters  very  much ! 


The  Privilege  of  Living 


I 

T  was  said  of  Sir  Walter  Scott  that  he 
enjoyed  more  in  twenty-four  hours  than 
most  men  do  in  a  week.  Such  happiness 
may  not  be  the  only  recommendation 
necessary  to  establish  a  man’s  character,  but,  other 
things  being  equal,  it  should  count  heavily  in  his 
favor.  Goodness  which  is  not  radiant  has  some¬ 
thing  the  matter  with  it.  Goodness  which,  how¬ 
ever  impeccable,  makes  life  seem  cramped,  pinched, 
restrained  and  unhappy,  is  not  real  goodness.  Such 
good  people  are  often  exasperating  nuisances.  One 
who  has  to  deal  with  them  understands  the  little 
girl’s  prayer:  “0  God,  make  all  the  bad  people  good 
• — and  make  all  the  good  people  nice!” 

That  happiness  is  a  test  of  character  can  be  seen 
from  the  fact  that  no  relationship  in  human  life 
ever  comes  to  its  best  until  it  flowers  out  into  the 

sense  of  privilege.  Even  the  relationship  of  teacher 

71 


72  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

and  pupils  in  a  school  is  not  fulfilled  so  long  as  the 
instructor  by  duress  and  discipline  is  forcing  stolid 
children  to  their  work.  Only  where  intellectual 
curiosity  is  set  on  fire,  where  boys  and  girls  with 
awakened  minds  are  eager  for  their  tasks,  has  the 
relationship  come  to  its  own. 

In  home  life  also  happiness  clearly  is  a  test.  Often 
marriage  sinks  to  burdensome  obligation — no  more. 
Two  people,  true  to  a  legal  arrangement,  but  not 
delighting  in  a  joyous  fellowship,  laboriously  keep 
vows  which  once  they  swore  to.  There  are  other 
homes,  however,  where  folk  live  together  who  would 
not  be  married  to  anybody  else  for  all  the  world. 
If  the  government  should  annul  all  marriage  vows,  it 
would  make  no  difference  to  them.  They  are  a 
family  because  they  love  to  be. 

As  for  friendship,  it  is  not  enough  to  speak  of 
that  in  terms  of  duty,  obligation,  responsibility. 
One  must  speak  of  that  in  terms  of  privilege.  If 
friendship  meant  to  anyone  no  more  than  duty  to 
which  he  dragged  himself  with  reluctant  steps,  we 
would  pray  to  have  him  leave  our  circle.  We  wish 
none  there  save  those  in  whom  all  sense  of  obliga¬ 
tion  is  underlain  and  lifted  as  by  a  rising  tide  with 
the  sense  of  privilege  in  being  friends. 

Happiness,  therefore,  is  a  real  test  of  the  fineness 
and  success  of  our  relationships.  A  man  who  has 
carried  that  inward  victory  so  far  that  he  is  happy 


THE  PRIVILEGE  OF  LIVING  73 


about  life  as  a  whole  and  has  become  what  Brown¬ 
ing  called 

A  happy -tempered  bringer  of  the  best 
Out  of  the  worst, 

is  rendering  the  world  one  of  the  greatest  services 
possible  to  man.  “We  need  not  care,”  said  Steven¬ 
son  about  happy  people,  “whether  they  could  prove 
the  forty-seventh  proposition;  they  do  a  better 
thing  than  that,  they  practically  demonstrate  the 
great  theorem  of  the  Liveableness  of  Life.” 

ii 

This  test  of  happiness  is  plainly  applicable  to 
duty.  Men  can  be  roughly  divided  into  three 
classes:  those  who  dislike  duty  and  refuse  to  do  it; 
those  who  dislike  it  and  drag  themselves  to  it  with 
reluctant  consent;  those  who  do  their  duty  and 
thoroughly  enjoy  it.  Representatives  of  the  last 
class  are  far  too  scarce.  One  of  the  saddest  facts  in 
human  life  is  the  general  impression  which  has 
everywhere  obtained  that  duty  is  grim,  hard,  for¬ 
bidding,  and  that  if  one  wishes  to  be  happy  he  would 
better  break  away  from  it.  “I  know  that  this  must 
be  bad  for  me,”  said  a  young  boy  with  a  favorite 
dessert,  “because  it  tastes  so  good.” 

Undoubtedly  a  large  factor  in  making  right  living 


74  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

seem  thus  a  dour  affair  has  been  our  treatment  of 
children  in  the  home.  The  first  impressions  of 
childhood  are  almost  ineradicable,  and  the  first  im¬ 
pression  which  many  a  home  makes  upon  a  child 
is  that  duty  is  an  unpleasant  necessity.  He  feels 
driven  to  it  by  fear  of  ill  consequence  if  he  disobey. 
Desirable  results  in  quiet  and  good  order  can  be  at 
once  obtained  by  a  swift  and  vehement  appeal  to 
such  fear.  “If  you  do  not  stop  that-,”  we  burst  out 

to  a  little  child,  “I  will - And  then  follows 

the  first  threat  that  leaps  into  the  irate  parent's 
mind.  The  consequence  is  immediate  :  A  shivering 
life  draws  in  upon  itself,  constrained,  repressed.  No 
wonder  that  duty  has  uncomfortable  associations  in 
multitudes  of  minds!  It  is  a  commentary  on  par¬ 
ents  everywhere  that,  over  two  thousand  years  after 
Alexander  the  Great  conquered  India,  Indian 
mothers  are  still  telling  their  children  that  Iskander 
will  get  them  if  they  do  not  obey. 

Upon  the  other  hand,  to  discover  the  petulant 
child’s  real  need  and  to  give  a  true  satisfaction  where 
a  false  one  was  being  sought,  to  unfold  the  disobe¬ 
dient  child  into  positive  goodwill  that  drives  ill- 
will  out;  to  get  joyful  expression  instead  of  sullen 
repression — anyone  can  tell  that  this  is  the  superior 
method  by  noting  the  faculties  in  himself  which  this 
requires.  All  that  it  takes  to  appeal  to  fear  is  in¬ 
dignation  and  vehemence,  and  they  are  cheap.  But 


THE  PRIVILEGE  OF  LIVING  75 

so  to  understand  the  child  as  to  unfold  his  life  into 
positive  and  radiant  character  takes  the  finest  quali¬ 
ties  that  we  possess — insight,  sympathy,  intelligence, 
tact  and  patience.  Some  parents  bring  up  their ^ 
children  on  thunder  and  lightning,  but  thunder  and 
lightning  never  yet  made  anything  grow. .  Rain  and 
dew  and  sunshine  cause  growth — quiet,  penetrating 
forces  that  develop  life.  And  while  thunder 'and 
lightning  are  occasionally  useful  to  clear  the  air, 
it  is  amazing  with  how  little  of  them  a  family  can 
get  along  if  only  there  is  enough  of  the  vitality 
that  causes  growth. 

This  does  not  mean  that  duty  always  is  easy;  it 
does  not  deny  the  self-sacrifice  which  right  living 
involves.  Everything  worth  while  in  the  intellectual 
or  moral  life  must  be  bought  and  paid  for  by  giving 
up  irreconcilable  habits  and  indulgences.  To  be  a 
good  physician,  a  good  lawyer,  a  good  musician,  or 
a  good  Christian  means  self-denial.  But  there  are 
too  many  folk  who  never  get  beyond  that  emphasis. 
Their  goodness  is  always  a  burden  to  them.  They 
are  halfway  good,  wishing  to  indulge  in  evil,  but  not 
daring  to,  clinging  to  right  living  with  reluctant 
resolution,  looking  upon  duty  as  an  elephant  might 
on  his  rider,  sitting  on  his  neck  and  pulling  at  his 
ears  with  an  iron  prong  to  make  him  go  whither 
he  would  not. 

If  a  man  in  any  realm  is  to  achieve  distinction  he 


76  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


must  outgrow  that  halfway  stage.  On  warm  spring 
days  a  schoolboy  may  miserably  endeavor  to  break 
in  his  mind  to  the  study  of  history.  “The  battle  of 
Marathon,”  he  reads,  “was  fought  in  490  B.C.” — 
and  then  across  his  imagination  floats  the  vision  of 
the  brook  where  trout  begin  to  rise.  Alas,  the 
burden  of  learning  history!  “The  battle  of  Platsea,” 
he  continues,  “settled  the  question  whether  Greek 
influence  or  Persian  should  be  supreme  in  Europe” 
— and  then  a  robin  sings  through  the  open  window 
and  issues  invitations  in  the  name  of  springtime 
that  drive  him  almost  to  despair.  Alas,  the  burden 
of  studying  history !  Such  a  beginning  for  a  student 
of  history  is  not  unnatural,  but  if  ever  that  boy  is 
to  become  a  real  historian — as  well  may  be  the  case 
— little  by  little  the  consciousness  of  what  is  ex¬ 
cluded  by  his  study  will  grow  dim.  More  and  more 
the  sense  of  privilege  in  knowing  history  will  become 
warm.  He  will  enter  with  delight  into  the  thoughts 
and  ambitions  of  generations  gone  and  will  rejoice 
to  find  in  deeds  long  passed  the  spring  of  all  that 
happens  among  us.  If  ever  he  is  to  be  a  real  his¬ 
torian,  the  sense  of  privilege  will  be  the  sign  of  it. 

If  ever  a  man  is  to  be  a  real  anything,  the  sense 
of  privilege  will  be  the  sign.  A  physician  to  whom 
doctoring  is  not  a  privilege  is  no  real  physician. 
A  teacher  to  whom  teaching  is  not  a  privilege  is  no 
real  teacher.  A  friend  to  whom  friendship  is  not 


THE  PRIVILEGE  OF  LIVING  77 

a  privilege  is  no  real  friend.  When  we  think  of  real 
patriots  we  think  of  Nathan  Hale,  who  wished  that 
he  had  more  lives  to  lose  for  his  country.  When 
we  think  of  real  heroes  we  think  of  David  Living¬ 
stone,  who  so  loved  his  hazardous  explorations  that 
he  thought  he  had  never  made  a  sacrifice  in  his 
life.  When  we  think  of  a  real  Christian  we  think 
of  a  man  like  Paul,  who  even  in  a  prison  could 
thank  God  for  counting  him  worthy  to  be  in  the 
ministry. 

This  conquest  of  duty,  by  which  we  not  only  do 
it,  but  enjoy  doing  it,  counting  the  gains  far  greater 
than  the  losses,  is  an  illustration  of  what  the  psy¬ 
chologists  call  selective  attention.  Some  folk  dwell 
upon  the  positive  gains  in  right  living;  others  dwell 
upon  the  negative  self-denials.  What  different  pic¬ 
tures  of  a  home  exist  in  different  people’s  minds! 
One  person  would  say:  A  home  is  God’s  best  gift, 
the  place  where  love  is  purest  and  dearest  and 
deepest,  where  life’s  shocks  are  cushioned  by  unfail¬ 
ing  friendliness,  where  we  are  best  known  and  yet 
best  loved  and  trusted,  where  we  can  be  ourselves 
without  fearing  to  be  misunderstood,  and  where 
the  years  deepen  the  tested  loyalty  of  those  whom 
we  love  better  than  ourselves.  Ask  another  what 
a  home  is,  and  a  very  different  answer  would  be 
given :  A  home  is  a  place  where  we  have  to  consider 
the  wishes  of  others,  where  we  cannot  always  have 


78  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


our  own  way,  where  children  fall  sick  and  require 
sacrificial  care,  where  puzzling  problems  rise  which 
it  is  hard  to  settle,  where  we  must  be  true  to  love 
to  keep  it,  where  every  day  brings  some  small  self- 
denial  and  every  year  some  great  one.  The  fact  is 
that  both  these  pictures  are  tiue,  but  anyone  who 
appreciates  a  real  home  would  be  utterly  impatient 
with  the  second.  To  be  sure,  a  good  home  means 
self-denial,  but,  then,  it  is  worth  it.  The  gains  im¬ 
measurably  outweigh  the  sacrifices.  It  is  not  a  bur¬ 
den  to  have  a  good  home.  No  matter  what  it  costs, 
it  is  one  of  life's  highest  privileges. 
fcThe  only  kind  of  goodness  that  does  much  good 
in  the  world  is  of  this  joyful  sort.  Many  people 
have  a  depressing  way  of  approaching  duty.  “Ought 
I?"  they  say.  They  drag  themselves  to  it  like 
Shakspere's 

.  .  .  whining  school-boy ,  with  his  satchel 

And  shining  morning  jace,  creeping  like  snail 

Unwillingly  to  school. 

But  there  are  others  who  come  with  another  ques¬ 
tion,  “May  I?"  They  clear  the  air  like  a  north¬ 
west  wind,  making  it  bracing  and  buoyant.  Bight 
living,  as  they  see  it,  is  an  invitation  extended,  a 
privilege  offered,  a  boon  conferred.  They  are  like 
Doctor  Bushnell,  concerning  whom  it  was  said  that 
“even  his  dying  wTas  play  to  him."  They  alone 


THE  PRIVILEGE  OF  LIVING  79 

commend  goodness  to  the  world,  for  most  people 
choose  goodness,  if  they  choose  it  at  all,  for  the 
same  reason  that  Tolstoy  became  a  Christian:  “I 
saw  around  me  people  who,  having  this  faith,  de¬ 
rived  from  it  an  idea  of  life  that  gave  them  strength 
to  live  and  strength  to  die  in  peace  and  in  joy.” 

hi 

To  be  sure,  this  world  is  often  a  desperately  diffi¬ 
cult  place  to  be  happy  in.  During  the  Great  War 
a  group  of  American  naval  aviators  were  stationed 
on  a  barren  island  off  the  northwest  coast  of  France 
where,  amid  lonely  and  desolate  conditions,  they 
carried  on  their  hazardous  scouting  in  the  air.  One 
day  an  officer,  censoring  the  men’s  letters,  ran  upon 
this  message  from  one  man  to  his  wife:  “Please 
don’t  send  me  any  more  nagging  letters.  I  can’t 
stand  it.  You  are  three  thousand  miles  away  and 
it  don’t  do  no  good.  Do  let  me  enjoy  this  war  in 
peace.”  Life  frequently  presents  grim  situations 
where  to  enjoy  war  in  peace  is  the  only  kind  of  hap¬ 
piness  that  we  can  expect. 

For  life  is  a  queer  mixture.  Good  fortune  and 
ill  befall  us  with  bewildering  variety.  Most  folk 
in  the  long  run  get  their  share  of  both.  Happiness, 
therefore,  does  not  depend  primarily  on  the  pre¬ 
ponderance  of  fortunate  over  unfortunate  circum- 


80  ‘  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

stance,  although  no  one  would  belittle  that.  Pri¬ 
marily  happiness  depends  on  a  man’s  insight,  on  his 
capacity  to  find  in  any  situation  elements  that  make 
it  worth  while.  It  is  fascinating  to  watch  the  in¬ 
evitableness  with  which  what  a  man  is  inside  de¬ 
termines  what  he  will  find  outside.  The  Bible,  for 
example,  has  meant  peace,  comfort,  illumination, 
moral  power  to  multitudes,  but  because  Whistler, 
the  artist,  was  a  bitter  controversialist,  writing  and 
publishing  scathing  attacks  on  enemies  and  former 
friends,  he  came  to  the  Bible  with  a  jaundiced  eye 
and  found  in  it  what  he  brought.  “That  splendid 
mine  of  invective” — such  was  his  description  of  the 
Book!  It  is  this  capacity  to  find  in  life  what  you 
bring  to  it  that  causes  a  great  deal  of  the  world’s 
unhappiness. 

If  any  one  insists  on  discovering  something  to  be 
unhappy  over,  there  is  nothing  to  prevent  his  find¬ 
ing  it.  Unfortunate  elements  exist  in  any  man’s 
life.  The  race’s  literature  has  loved  to  dwell  upon 
these  vulnerable  spots  which  are  to  be  found  in  the 
most  highly  gifted  and  fortunate  of  men.  Achilles 
is  dipped  in  the  River  Styx  by  his  mother  Thetis 
to  make  him  invulnerable,  but  the  heel  by  which 
she  holds  him  is  not  wet.  Siegfried  bathes  in  the 
dragon’s  blood,  but  a  lime  leaf  falls  upon  his  back 
and  leaves  one  unprotected  spot.  Balder’s  mother, 
in  the  Icelandic  sagas,  makes  all  Nature  except  the 


THE  PRIVILEGE  OF  LIVING  81 

mistletoe  swear  not  to  harm  her  son,  and  by  the 
mistletoe  he  falls.  Every  life  has  its  weak  spots, 
its  lamentable  elements,  and  if  we  insist  on  em¬ 
phasizing  them  we  can  make  miserable  business  out 
of  living.  Tyndall  said  that  a  bucket  or  two  of 
water,  whipped  into  a  cloud,  can  obscure  an  Alpine 
peak.  In  practical  experience,  the  heights  of  life 
are  often  hidden  by  just  such  a  process. 

Upon  the  other  hand,  there  are  few  lives  where  a 
positive  and  appreciative  attitude  will  not  discover 
plenty  of  things  to  be  happy  over.  A  young  British 
soldier  during  the  war  landed  at  Southampton  with 
both  his  legs  cut  off  close  to  the  hips.  Even  the 
surgeon  who  greeted  him  winced.  “That  is  hard 
luck,”  he  said.  “Oh,  I  don’t  know,”  said  the  soldier, 
“I  thank  my  God  that  I  have  my  health  and 
strength  yet!”  The  plain  fact  is  that  some  of  the 
happiest  people  we  have  ever  known  have  been  in 
difficult  circumstances,  handicapped  within  and  hard 
bestead  without;  but  for  all  that,  by  the  magic  of 
selective  attention,  they  lived  radiant  and  victori¬ 
ous  lives. 

The  kind  of  insight  which  discovers  happiness 
in  difficult  situations,  commonplace  people,  and  cus¬ 
tomary  tasks  is  one  of  the  surest  tests  of  character, 
for  it  always  involves  generosity,  appreciativeness, 
love.  The  one  man  who  cannot  know  abiding  hap¬ 
piness  is  the  self-absorbed  man.  Dr.  Charles  R. 


82  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

Brown  tells  us  of  a  trip  lip  the  Rhine  from  Cologne 
to  Mainz:  An  American  family  boarded  the  boat 
and  asked  for  some  ice  cream.  Informed  that  there 
was  none,  they  became  very  unhappy.  They  had 
been  used  to  ice  cream  on  the  Hudson  day  boats, 
and  they  saw  no  reason  why  they  should  not  have  it 
on  the  Rhine  day  boats.  All  day  they  grumbled. 
The  trip  took  them  past  Lorelei,  and  Drachenfels, 
Ehrenbreitstein,  and  the  mouth  of  the  Moselle,  but 
they  missed  most  of  the  beauty — they  wanted  some 
ice  cream.  They  were  like  Pompilia’s  father  in 
Browning’s  poem,  who 

Shut  his  fool’s  eyes  fast  on  the  visible  good 

And  wealth  for  certain;  opened  them  owl-wide 

On  fortune’s  sole  piece  of  forgetfulness. 

For  them  it  was  not  a  happy  day,  for  only  the  ap¬ 
preciative  are  happy  and  only  the  unselfish  can 
be  appreciative.  Many  people,  at  the  end  of  a 
longer  journey  than  the  Rhine  trip,  have  missed 
the  joy  of  it  because  they  were  obsessed  with  some¬ 
thing  which  they  wanted  for  themselves. 

It  is  a  great  day  in  any  man’s  life  when  he  dis¬ 
cerns  that  no  situation  is  without  its  redeeming  ele¬ 
ments,  no  task  without  its  interesting  opportunities, 
no  people  without  their  picturesque  aspects;  that 
nothing  in  life  is  really  commonplace  ;  that  common¬ 
placeness  in  others  is  only  lack  of  insight  in  our¬ 
selves.  In  William  C.  Gannett’s  words: 


THE  PRIVILEGE  OF  LIVING  83 

The  poem  hangs  on  the  berry-bush, 

When  comes  the  poet’s  eye; 

The  street  begins  to  masquerade, 

When  Shakspere  passes  by. 

IV 

The  Declaration  of  Independence  joins  in  a  single 
phrase  “liberty”  and  “the  pursuit  of  happiness,” 
and,  so  doing,  marries  two  ideas  which  belong  to¬ 
gether.  Real  happiness  is  indissolubly  associated 
with  freedom.  Angelo  Patri  tells  us  that  a  little 
Sicilian  lad  landed  a  few  years  ago  at  the  port  of 
New  York  when  the  city  was  aflame  with  flags. 
It  was  the  proudest  day  of  that  boy’s  life,  because 
he  thought  the  flags  were  flying  to  welcome  him, 
who  from  far  Sicily  was  coming  to  the  land  of  prom¬ 
ised  freedom.  Later  he  found  himself  in  a  public 
school  in  the  Italian  quarter  of  the  city,  having 
difficulty  with  the  English  tongue.  But  one  day  he 
brought  to  his  teacher  a  piece  of  pottery  which  he 
had  made,  with  a  scene  from  his  homeland  molded 
on  it.  The  teacher  was  a  real  educator.  She  wanted 
to  bring  out  to  free  expression  wdiat  was  in  her 
pupils.  She  rose  like  the  sun  in  encouragement 
upon  that  boy’s  work.  The  boy  began  with  a  pot¬ 
tery  class  in  the  school ;  now,  a  young  man  of  large 
promise  studying  the  Beaux  Arts,  he  is  looking  for¬ 
ward  to  a  promised  period  of  residence  in  Rome. 


84  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

He  says  now  that  he  knows  the  flags  were  not  flying 
for  him  the  day  he  came ;  he  knows  now  that  it  was 
Lincoln’s  Birthday.  But  he  thinks  that  in  a  sense 
they  were  flying  for  him,  because  America  was 
giving  to  him  the  kind  of  welcome  that  Lincoln 
would  have  liked  to  have  him  get. 

That  boy  is  happy  because  he  is  being  set  free, 
is  having  liberated  within  him  his  latent  possibilities 
and  powers.  Happiness  is  a  test,  not  only  of  one’s 
power  to  find  in  duty  a  privilege  and  not  a  burden, 
to  discern  redeeming  elements  in  untoward  situa¬ 
tions;  it  is  a  test  also  of  the  degree  to  which  we 
are  achieving  an  inward  release  of  our  own  per¬ 
sonalities.  No  cramped  and  smothered  life  is  happy. 
People  are  happy  as  they  become  inwardly  free. 

^  All  movements  for  human  welfare  can  be  in¬ 
terpreted  in  terms  of  this  desired  release  of  life  from 
pinching  handicaps  into  fulfillment  and  abundance. 
To  lift  the  economic  burdens  which  depress  life  and 
spoil  opportunity,  to  liberate  folk  from  the  slavery 
of  their  diseases,  to  set  men  free  by  education  from 
the  Town  of  Stupidity,  which,  as  Bunyan  rightly 
says,  is  only  four  degrees  north  of  the  City  of  De¬ 
struction  itself — all  these  endeavors  to  give  persons 
a  chance  to  be  their  best  selves  are  crusades  for 
human  emancipation  and  happiness.  Nobody  doubts 
the  place  of  education  or  of  economic  betterment 
in  this  list  of  life’s  liberators,  but  there  is  one  force  ^ 


THE  PRIVILEGE  OF  LIVING  85 

which  ought  to  be  in  this  list  which  many  people 
do  not  think  of  putting  there — religion. 

It  never  will  be  altogether  well  with  us  until  we 
see  that  religion  at  its  best  is  a  great  emancipator 
of  personality,  and  until  we  get  more  religion  at  its 
best  to  function  toward  that  end. 

Strangely  enough,  many  folk,  so  far  from  thinking 
of  religion  as  a  radiant,  joyful,  liberating  force, 
class  it  in  an  opposite  category.  A  typical  conversa¬ 
tion  over  a  dinner  table  reached  the  conclusion  that 
churches  and  ministers  are  necessary  and  should  be 
supported  for  the  common  good,  because  so  many 
people  need  restraints  put  upon  their  exuberant 
wickedness,  and  churches  and  ministers  furnish  these 
restraints.  These  convivial  analysts  of  the  religious 
life  interpreted  it,  not  in  terms  of  liberation,  but  in 
terms  of  suppression/Our  schools  and  shops  and  fac¬ 
tories  are  filled  with  youth  who,  if  the  suggestion 
came  that  they  should  be  Christians,  would  never 
think  of  it  as  promising  the  unfolding  of  life  into  a 
new  liberty,  the  expansion  of  life  into  its  true  fulfill¬ 
ment;  it  would  mean  to  them  a  call  to  delimit  and 
suppress  themselves,  to  restrain  and  cramp  life. 
They  would  feel  as  some  of  us  used  to  feel  when, 
gladly  playing  out-of-doors,  we  were  summoned  in 
to  prayers  because  the  minister  had  come  to  call. 
How  we  dragged  ourselves  with  unwilling  feet  into 
the  old-fashioned  parlor  where  we  had  to  be  careful 


86 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


not  to  knock  the  knickknacks  from  the  whatnot  or 
brush  the  tidies  from  the  upholstered  furniture!-. 

Nevertheless,  the  men  who  best  have  known  what 
Christian  living  is  have  always  talked  of  it  in  terms 
of  liberty.  In  view  of  this  conflict  between  the  mis¬ 
understanding  of  the  mob  and  the  testimony  of  the 
experts,  we  may  justly  make  one  claim:  Christianity 
has  a  right  to  be  judged  in  terms  of  its  own  noblest 
exhibitions  and  not  in  terms  of  its  perversions  and 
caricatures.  It  has  here  the  same  right  which  any 
essential  aspect  of  man’s  life,  like  music,  has. 

Music  to  some  people  is  one  of  the  noblest  and 
most  liberating  gifts  of  God  to  men ;  it  takes  spirits 
grown  heavy  amid  things  material  and  gives  them 
wings  to  fly;  it  is  Handel  and  Wagner  and  Chopin 
and  Mozart  and  Grieg. 

But  to  others  music  is  ragtime  ground  from  hand 
organs,  and  music-hall  ballads,  and  the  ribald  songs 
of  vaudeville;  it  is  the  catch-penny  tunes  of  tired 
mechanical  pianos,  the  calliope  at  the  circus  and  the 
mouth  organ  of  the  newsboy  at  his  stand.  No  in¬ 
telligent  man,  however,  accepts  the  latter  description 
as  adequate,  for  music  has  a  right  to  be  understood 
in  terms  of  its  noblest  utterance.  So,  too,  has  re¬ 
ligion.  Much  popular  Christianity  is  not  liberating 
and  joyful;  it  is  repressive,  constraining,  imprisoning 
to  mind  and  spirit.  But  it  is  that  because  it  is  not 
really  Christian. 


THE  PRIVILEGE  OF  LIVING  87 

One  suspects  that  Jesus  would  understand  better 
than  we  do  some  of  our  young  people  who  run 
wild  and  fall  on  ruin  like  the  prodigal. 

Many  of  them  are  brought  up  to  think  that  good¬ 
ness  means  repression.  All  through  their  maturing 
youth  they  keep  coming  upon  new  powers,  new  pas¬ 
sions,  new  ambitions,  and  they  are  told  that  these 
must  be  repressed.  At  first  they  docilely  accept 
that  negative  idea.  They  try  to  be  good  by  saying 
“no”  to  their  surging  life. 

Then,  some  day,  they  grow  so  utterly  weary  of 
this  tame,  negative,  repressive  goodness  that  they 
can  tolerate  it  no  longer,  and  they  start  out  to  be 
free  in  wild  self-indulgence,  only  to  find  it  the  road, 
not  to  freedom,  but  to  slavery,  with  habits  that  bind 
them  and  diseases  that  curse  them  and  blasted  repu¬ 
tations  that  ruin  them.  Would  not  Jesus  say  to  them 
some  such  thing  as  this:  “You  have  made  a  bad 
mistake.  Goodness  is  not  mainly  repression.  It  is 
finding  your  real  self  and  then  having  it  set  free. 
It  is  positively  living  for  those  things  which  alone 
are  worth  living  for.  It  is  expression,  the  effulgence 
of  life  into  its  full  power  and  its  abundant  fruitage. 

I  came  that  ye  might  have  life,  and  that  ye  might 
have  it  abundantly.” 

That  is  real  Christianity,  as  it  is  the  spirit  of 
Jesus. 

Some  Christians  carry  their  religion  on  their  backs. 


88  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

It  is  a  packet  of  beliefs  and  practices  which  they 
must  bear.  At  times  it  grows  heavy  and  they  would 
willingly  lay  it  down,  but  that  would  mean  a  break 
with  old  traditions,  so  they  shoulder  it  again.  But 
real  Christians  do  not  carry  their  religion,  their  re¬ 
ligion  carries  them.  It  is  not  weight;  it  is  wings. 
It  lifts  them  up,  it  sees  them  over  hard  places, 
it  makes  the  universe  seem  friendly,  life  purposeful, 
hope  real,  sacrifice  worth  while.  It  sets  them  free 
from  fear,  futility,  discouragement,  and  sin — the 
great  enslavers  of  men’s  souls.  You  can  know  a 
real  Christian,  when  you  see  him,  by  his  buoyancy. 


Minding  One's  Own  Business 


I 

AID  Dwight  L.  Moody,  “I  have  had  more 
trouble  with  myself  than  with  any  other 
man  I  have  ever  met.”  Most  people  could 
say  the  same  thing.  In  the  old  “Wonder¬ 
land”  which  used  to  charm  the  children,  many  of 
us  recall  walking  down  a  corridor  through  the 
farther  end  of  which  we  saw  people  approaching  us 
as  we  approached  them,  until  suddenly  we  bumped 
into  ourselves  in  a  mirror. 

And  in  the  larger  wonderland  of  mature  experi¬ 
ence,  we  have  discovered  that  no  man  travels  far 
without  encountering  himself.  He  may  go  into  busi¬ 
ness  with  alluring  prospects,  but  he  soon  discovers 
that  his  major  problem  is  himself.  He  may  inherit 
or  achieve  ample  professional  opportunity,  but  he 
soon  discovers  that  his  major  problem  is  himself. 
He  may  marry  amid  the  congratulations  of  his 
friends,  but  he  soon  sees  that  the  maintenance  of 
a  fine  home  is  primarily  a  problem  with  himself. 


90  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

When  the  Prodigal  Son  sat  among  the  swine  in  the 
far  country,  the  parable  tells  us  that  he  “came  to 
himself.”  That  was  not  a  single  experience — he  kept 
coming  to  himself.  He  could  find  no  road  anywhere 
that  did  not  lead  back  to  himself.  Whichever  way 
he  turned  he  ran  into  himself. 

The  resolute  grappling  of  a  man  with  his  own  life 
is  one  of  the  most  searching  tests  of  character,  for 
most  people  are  willing  to  grapple  with  anything 
else  under  heaven,  from  international  problems  to 
spiritualism,  rather  than  to  face  squarely  their 
individual  responsibility  for  their  own  lives.  A  poet 
once  had  a  dream,  so  runs  the  tale,  in  which  he 
was  ruined  by  a  veiled  figure.  He  dreamed  that  he 
made  a  fortune  and  the  veiled  figure  snatched  it 
from  him,  that  he  achieved  fame  and  the  veiled 
figure  turned  it  to  disgrace.  He  dreamed  that  the 
veiled  figure  frightened  him  in  bed,  spoiled  the  taste 
of  his  food  at  table,  abashed  him  in  company,  and 
on  the  poet’s  wedding  day  stopped  the  mouth  of 
the  priest,  crying  “I  forbid  the  banns!”  “Who  are 

you?”  cried  the  wretched  poet,  tearing  away  the  veil 

* 

— and  lo,  the  face  of  the  stranger  was  his  own ! 

The  ruination  of  most  people  is  themselves. 

The  clear  recognition  of  this  fact  is  one  of  the 
elements  in  Shakspere’s  greatness  as  a  dramatist. 
No  tragedies  compare  with  his,  and  for  this  reason 
among  others:  he  saw  that  life’s  real  tragedy  lies 


MINDING  ONE’S  OWN  BUSINESS  91 

within  ourselves.  Even  the  old  Greek  dramatists, 
with  all  their  insight,  caused  their  victims  to  fall 
on  ruin  because  of  a  mysterious  cosmic  fate  which 
ruled  the  destinies  of  gods  and  men.  Shakspere, 
however,  shifts  the  battlefield  to  the  souls  of  men : 

The  fault ,  dear  Brutus ,  is  not  in  our  stars , 

But  in  ourselves,  that  we  are  underlings. 

Hamlet  wrestles  with  his  own  hesitant,  shocked  and 
indecisive  soul,  Macbeth  with  his  own  ambition  and 
remorse,  Othello  with  his  own  insatiable  jealousy. 
The  greatest  characters  in  Shakspere’s  tragedies  are 
all  having  it  out  with  their  own  souls. 

The  insight  of  the  dramatist  lighted  here  on  a 
fundamental  law  of  life.  All  that  a  lion  eats  be¬ 
comes  lion.  All  that  a  serpent  eats  becomes  serpent. 
Through  the  whole  of  life  runs  the  mysterious  law 
of  assimilation,  by  which  not  so  much  the  outward 
nature  of  the  thing  devoured,  but  the  inward  nature 
of  the  one  who  eats  it  determines  the  consequence. 
Every  man’s  fate  is  himself. 


ii 

So  elemental  is  this  fact  that  one  might  expect 
men,  as  the  initial  business  of  living,  resolutely  to 
take  charge  of  their  own  lives,  to  deal  decisively  with 


92  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

the  problem  of  their  own  character  and  careers,  to 
make  themselves  responsible  for  themselves.  Upon 
the  contrary,  one  of  the  commonest  sights  is  folk 
who  make  themselves  responsible  for  everybody 
else  except  themselves.  With  the  middle  of  the 
eighteenth  century  humanitarianism  and  philan¬ 
thropy  began  to  flourish  as  never  before.  In  spite 
of  war  and  its  bitter  fruits,  there  has  been  since  then 
an  immense  expansion  of  the  social  conscience.  “Am 
I  my  brother’s  keeper?”  is  a  question  to  which  all 
right-minded  folk  feel  under  obligation  to  say  “Yes.” 
It  is,  however,  a  dangerous  question  to  answer  glibly 
in  the  affirmative.  A  vague,  sentimental  interest  in 
everybody  else  is  much  easier  to  achieve  than  that 
elemental  act  of  will  by  which  a  man  decisively 
takes  charge  of  his  own  life  and  makes  something 
worth  while  out  of  it. 

There  are  some  possessions  with  which  we  are  not 
likely  to  be  too  generous.  With  genuine  sympathy, 
with  real  friendship,  with  wisely  distributed  money, 
we  may  be  as  generous  as  we  please.  But  we  can 
easily  be  too  generous  with  our  sense  of  responsibil¬ 
ity.  If  anybody  has  a  large  amount  of  that  valuable 
article,  it  is  always  safe  advice  that  he  should  use  by 
all  odds  the  major  portion  of  it  on  himself. 

Some  of  the  most  unamiable  people  with  whom 
we  deal  make  their  failure  here.  Henry  Ward 
Beecher  once  said:  “The  reforms  are  well  enough; 


MINDING  ONE’S  OWN  BUSINESS  93 

but  I  can  not  swallow  the  reformers.”  Beecher 
would  have  many  sympathizers  today.  A  real  re¬ 
former  is  a  public  blessing,  but  his  counterfeit  is  a 
hectic  uplifter  so  zealous  about  saving  the  world  at 
large  that  he  himself,  acrimonious,  dogmatic,  cen¬ 
sorious,  and  altogether  unlovable,  has  lost  whatever 
persuasive  beauty  he  might  have  had.  The  tempter 
is  extraordinarily  ingenious  and  resourceful.  When 
he  cannot  spoil  a  life  one  way,  he  manages  to  do 
it  another.  Some  he  ruins  by  their  selfishness ;  they 
will  think  of  no  one  save  themselves.  When,  how¬ 
ever,  he  finds  folk  who  insist  on  thinking  of  other 
people,  he  changes  his  tactics.  He  makes  them  think 
about  other  people  all  the  time,  worry  about  other 
people,  assume  responsibility  for  other  people,  med¬ 
dle  with  other  people,  until  at  last  these  victims  of 
his  wiles  reach  the  estate  which  Jesus  pictured — a 
man  with  a  beam  in  his  own  eye,  trying  with  labori¬ 
ous  unselfishness  to  get  a  mote  out  of  his  brother’s 
eye. 

Sir  George  Mellish  was  one  of  the  great  jurists 
of  England.  As  a  member  of  a  committee  appointed 
to  draw  up  resolutions  of  congratulation  to  the 
Queen,  he  discovered  that  his  colleagues  had  begun 
one  resolution  with  the  words  “Being  conscious  as 
we  are  of  our  own  defects.” 

“No,  no,”  said  Judge  Mellish,  “that  will  never  do. 
We  must  not  lie  to  Her  Majesty.  Change  it  to 


94  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

‘Being  conscious  as  we  are  of  one  another’s  de¬ 
fects!’  ” 

Indeed,  so  difficult  is  it  to  learn  this  lesson  of 
using  our  sense  of  responsibility  upon  ourselves,  that 
one  would  like  to  know  whether  the  readers  of  this 
article  have  not  been  saying  “This  hits  off  So-and- 
So  exactly.  He  needs  this.  He  always  is  meddling 
in  other  people’s  business.”  So  we  shy  the  truth 
at  somebody  else.  We  feel  very  responsible  about 
other  people.  One  of  the  rarest  of  virtues  in  this 
world  is  the  resolute  grappling  of  a  man  with  his 
own  life. 

On  Sunday,  August  5,  1860,  Henry  Wadsworth 
Longfellow  wrote  in  his  diary,  “John  Ware,  of  Cam¬ 
bridge,  preached  a  good  sermon.”  And  then  Long¬ 
fellow  added  what  many  people  cannot  honestly  say 
after  a  sermon:  “I  applied  it  to  myself.” 

hi 

Decisive  dealing  with  one’s  own  life  is  always  a 
major  problem  in  youth.  Over  twenty  years  ago  a 
Hungarian  boy,  whose  ancestors  had  toiled  in  pov¬ 
erty  for  centuries  on  a  farm  in  the  Carpathian  Moun¬ 
tains,  landed  at  the  port  of  New  York.  He  arrived 
poor  in  money,  family,  and  friends,  and,  having 
heard  that  all  wealth  came  from  Pittsburgh,  he  went 
there.  Too  young  to  work  in  the  mines,  he  went  into 


MINDING  ONE’S  OWN  BUSINESS  95 

a  hotel  kitchen  and  washed  dishes.  Trying  to  size 
up  the  reasons  for  America’s  superior  opportunities, 
he  put  his  finger  on  education.  Then  he  worked  by 
day  and  studied  by  night.  When  he  graduated  from 
high  school,  appointed  orator,  he  took  as  his  subject, 
“The  Great  Opportunities  Which  America  Gives  to 
the  Boys  Who  Come  Here.”  He  worked  his  way 
through  one  of  our  first-rate  universities  and  grad¬ 
uated  with  honor;  he  worked  his  way  through  the 
Harvard  Law  School.  Now  he  is  associated  with  a 
leading  law  firm  in  New  York  City,  and  a  year 
ago  he  was  admitted  to  the  bar.  Many  first-rate 
qualities  of  character  helped  to  make  possible  such 
an  achievement,  but  at  the  heart  of  all  of  them  was 
this  primary  virtue:  that  young  man  decisively  and 
efficiently  took  charge  of  himself. 

How  different  is  the  life  of  many  of  our  youth! 
Instead  of  putting  responsibility  on  them,  we  sur¬ 
round  them  from  the  time  they  are  born  with  every 
comfort  that  money  can  buy.  To  a  mature  mind, 
knowing  the  humble  breeding  places  of  great  ability, 
such  well-to-do  homes  run  by  indulgent  parents 
prophesy  no  superiority  in  the  children  who  are 
reared  there.  But  how  shall  the  children  know 
that?  To  live  in  a  fine  house,  surrounded  by  a 
commodious  environment,  to  be  pampered  and  pro¬ 
tected,  to  have  money  to  spend,  leisure  to  enjoy, 
to  move  in  the  best  circles — how  subtly  these  so- 


96 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


called  advantages  weave  their  spell  around  growing 
children.  Life  looks  easy.  They  learn  to  trust  their 
fortunate  circumstances,  not  themselves.  In  Scott’s 
phrase,  they  count  on  a  fine  set  of  china  to  heighten 
the  flavor  of  indifferent  tea.  The  result  is  often 
worse  than  wildness;  the  result  is  indecisiveness, 
irresponsibility,  a  meandering,  irresolute,  procras¬ 
tinating  life  that  never  arrives.  And  in  youth  in¬ 
decisive  procrastination  is  fatal.  The  marvel  of  liv¬ 
ing  when  we  are  young  is  that  life  is  a  fairy  land  of 
possibilities.  When  a  youth  says  that  he  has  not  yet 
decided  whether  he  will  be  a  civil  engineer,  or  a 
landscape  artist,  or  a  lawyer,  or  a  professional  avia¬ 
tor,  or  a  clergyman,  we  have  to  take  him  seriously. 
He  may  be  any  one  of  these.  The  doors  are  all 
open.  He  is  young.  But  we  who  have  reached  ma¬ 
turity  have  all  these  years  been  growing  familiar 
with  the  sound  of  closing  doors.  The  range  of  our 
possible  choices  has  been  narrowing  down.  There 
are  some  things  on  earth  we  never  can  do  now.  It 
is  too  late.  Happy  the  youth  who  takes  charge  of  his 
life  in  time,  makes  worthwhile  decisions  about  the 
loyalties,  purposes  and  ambitions  that  shall  control 
him,  finds  his  work  in  the  world  and  masters  it! 

Behind  most  of  the  shilly-shallying  of  young 
people  is  the  idea  that  they  can  bluff  life  through 
without  tackling  the  problem  of  themselves.  It  is 
a  vain  hope;  life  has  been  at  the  game  for  a  long 


MINDING  ONE’S  OWN  BUSINESS  97 

time  and  knows  all  the  moves.  To  many  a  youth 
wealth  appears  omnipotent,  so  that  to  possess  it 
seems  a  sufficient  substitute  for  serious  wrestling 
with  oneself.  The  fact  is,  however,  that  great  pos¬ 
sessions  only  throw  a  man  back  upon  himself.  For 
there  is  an  important  difference  between  posses¬ 
sion  and  ownership:  possession  is  having  things; 
ownership  is  the  enjoyment  and  appreciative  use  of 
things.  Said  the  poet  to  Dives,  “The  land  is  yours, 
but  the  landscape  is  mine.”  Possession  concerns 
what  a  man  has  in  his  hands;  ownership  concerns 
what  a  man  is  in  himself. 

Possession  is  sending  downtown,  as  one  woman  is 
said  to  have  done,  for  three  yards  of  good  books 
in  brown  bindings  to  match  the  furniture;  owner¬ 
ship  is  saying  with  Fenelon,  “If  the  crowns  of  all 
the  kingdoms  in  Europe  were  laid  down  at  my  feet 
in  exchange  for  my  love  of  reading,  I  would  spurn 
them  all.”  Possession  is  having  a  morocco-bound 
copy  of  Wordsworth  that  you  never  look  at;  owner¬ 
ship  is  having  Wordsworth,  it  may  be  in  paper 
covers,  a  source  of  inextinguishable  delight.  Pos¬ 
session  is  having  a  house;  ownership  is  having  a 
home.  Possession  is  material;  ownership  is  spirit¬ 
ual.  A  man  may  possess  millions  and  own  nothing. 
How  much  a  man  owns  depends  on  the  height  and 
breadth  and  depth  of  his  mind  and  soul. 

Nor  does  a  youth  evade  the  necessity  of  tackling 


98  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

himself  when  he  tries  to  achieve  an  education.  No 
amount  of  acquired  information  will  in  the  end 
make  much  of  a  man  out  of  him  unless  he  resolutely 
wrestles  with  his  own  thinking.  It  is  easy  to  be, 
as  Pope  put  it,  a 

bookful  blockhead,  ignorantly  read, 

With  loads  of  learned  lumber  in  his  head. 

But  to  be  a  straight-thinking,  reliable,  intelligent 
man  is  difficult. 

A  young  Polish  girl  in  a  New  York  school,  asked 
in  common  with  her  class  to  write  an  essay  on  the 
difference  between  an  educated  and  an  intelligent 
man,  summed  up  the  matter:  “An  educated  man 
gets  his  thinks  from  someone  else,  but  an  intelligent 
man  works  his  own  thinks.” 

Nor  does  the  youth  evade  the  tackling  of  himself 
when,  under  the  impulse  of  friendliness,  he  tries 
to  be  useful.  The  choicest  gift  that  any  man  can 
give  his  friends  is  himself  at  his  best.  Most  people 
are  willing  to  give  almost  anything  rather  than 
that.  Even  fathers  and  mothers  will  give  their 
children  things  in  lavish  and  sometimes  smother¬ 
ing  abundance,  but  themselves  at  their  best  in  in¬ 
timate  companionship — for  the  lack  of  that  be¬ 
stowal  homes  go  to  ruin.  Every  real  endeavor  after 
friendly  usefulness  thrown  a  man  back  on  himself, 
and  more  than  once,  with  most  of  us,  out  of  the 


MINDING  ONE’S  OWN  BUSINESS  99 

charcoal  pit  of  what  we  are  the  fumes  have  risen 
to  spoil  the  grace  and  beauty  of  the  thing  that  we 
have  done. 

Even  if  a  youth  in  all  these  realms  succeeded  in 
evading  the  necessity  of  tackling  himself,  trouble 
would  still  be  left,  and  trouble  is  an  adept  at  forc¬ 
ing  a  man  to  grapple  with  himself.  Samuel  Pepys, 
for  example,  has  left  in  his  diary  the  most  intimate 
record  that  any  man  ever  put  on  paper  about  his 
own  life.  As  we  read  it  we  watch  with  interest, 
amusement,  sometimes  pity,  his  vanities,  ambitions, 
quarrels,  conceits,  and  prejudices,  his  ingenious 
schemes  for  self-advancement,  his  toadying,  and  his 
pride.  If  ever  a  man  might  have  bluffed  life  through 
with  little  serious  tackling  of  himself,  he  was  en¬ 
dowed  for  the  purpose.  But  when  he  was  thirty- 
seven  years  old  life  brought  him  up  with  a  round 
turn.  Blindness  came  upon  him.  “And  so,”  he 
wrote  as  he  closed  his  diary,  “I  betake  myself  to 
that  course,  which  is  almost  as  much  as  to  see  myself 
go  into  my  grave:  for  which,  and  all  the  discomforts 
that  will  accompany  my  being  blind,  the  good  God 
prepare  me!”  At  last  even  Pepys  had  to  wrestle 
with  himself. 

One  way  or  another  life  forces  us  to  this  primary 
test  of  character.  No  good  life  ever  yet  was  lived 
which  did  not  face  it  and  win  through.  The  de¬ 
cisive  issue  may  come  as  a  struggle  with  temper  or 


100  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

habit,  as  a  battle  with  oneself  over  the  vocation  to 
which  life  shall  be  given,  as  a  definite  call  to  self- 
sacrifice,  as  a  collision  with  disappointment  and 
misery,  as  a  conflict  between  religious  faith  and 
doubt — in  whatever  way  it  rises,  it  divides  men  like 
Judgment  Day.  The  man  who  has  not  successfully 
grappled  with  himself  will  never  grapple  success¬ 
fully  with  anybody  else. 


IV 

At  its  deepest  this  inner  problem  of  human  life 
is  simply  the  age-long  religious  problem  in  its  in- 
tensest  form — the  relationship  of  a  man  with  his 
own  soul.  One  does  not  mean  by  “soul”  what  a 
young  woman  recently  defined  it  to  be:  “a  sort  of 
round  haze  a  little  larger  than  a  baseball,  somewhere 
in  the  body  near  the  heart.”  A  man’s  soul  is  his 
whole  invisible  personality — self-conscious  being 
that  thinks,  purposes,  and  loves — a  man’s  spiritual 
life  in  its  heights  and  depths.  Happy  the  youth 
who  before  it  is  too  late  discovers  that  no  success 
elsewhere  matters  without  success  here!  For  youth 
is  the  time  in  which  to  face  this  inner  problem  of 
the  spiritual  life.  In  infancy  our  bodies  first  awake 
to  enjoy  the  world  into  which  we  have  been  born; 
then  our  minds  awake  to  curious  questioning  and 
restless  desire  for  knowledge;  then  our  souls  awake 


MINDING  ONE’S  OWN  BUSINESS  101 

to  a  conscious  search  for  life’s  spiritual  meaning  and 
purpose.  Unless  a  youth  has  been  too  early  per¬ 
verted  and  wronged,  he  will  not  easily  escape  this 
third  experience.  A  certain  flare  and  flame  of  spirit¬ 
ual  chivalry  is  one  of  the  noblest  birthrights  of  a 
normal  youth. 

Some  of  us  can  read  with  dry  eyes  now  Emerson’s 
essay  on  “The  Over-Soul,”  but  when  first  in  youth 
we  read  it  we  wept  for  very  joy  of  having  been 
born  into  a  world  where  such  high  thoughts  dwelt. 
Some  of  us  calmly  can  observe  a  great  cathedral 
now,,  but  when  in  youth  we  first  saw  one  we  walked 
about  in  it  for  hours,  in  worlds  unrealized,  and 
thought  that  we  heard  the  souls  of  all  the  dead  who 
ever  had  worshiped  there  singing  “Holy,  holy,  holy 
is  the  Lord!”  Some  of  us  can  listen  calmly  now  to 
the  call  of  duty,  but  looking  back  to  youth  we  know 
what  the  poet  meant: 

So  nigh  is  grandeur  to  our  dust , 

So  near  is  God  to  man, 

When  Duty  whispers  low,  Thou  must, 

The  youth  replies,  I  can! 

There  is  glory  about  youth,  when  the  soul,  which 
has  waited  like  an  enchanted  princess  for  some 
prince  to  rouse  her,  awakes  and  looks  with  fresh 
and  unspoiled  eyes  on  life. 

See,  then,  what  we  do  with  this  priceless  experi- 


102  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


ence,  this  unutterable  opportunity  from  the  begin¬ 
ning  to  possess  a  rich  and  resourceful  spiritual  life ! 
Some  of  us  do  cherish  it.  Although  life  is  always 
hard  upon  it,  and  although  it  is  impossible  to  keep 
it  with  its  first  naive  and  childlike  freshness,  we  do 
cherish  it.  In  some  of  us  it  even  grows  deeper  with 
the  years,  like  Beethoven’s  music.  At  eight  Beetho¬ 
ven  played  in  a  concert;  at  eleven  he  was  made 
deputy  court  organist.  There  must  have  been  a 
flame  about  the  youthful  playing  of  that  ardent  soul. 
But  not  until  he  was  thirty-eight  did  he  write  the 
fifth  and  sixth  symphonies;  not  until  he  was  forty- 
five  did  he  write  the  seventh  and  eighth;  and  he 
wrote  the  ninth  at  fifty-two.  He  is  a  parable  of  a 
spiritual  experience  which  bubbles  up  in  youth  like 
a  sparkling  fountain  and  then  flows  out,  a  broaden¬ 
ing,  deepening  river,  toward  the  sea. 

Some  of  us  so  deal  with  our  souls,  but  some  of 
us  do  the  very  opposite.  Busy,  ambitious,  over- 
engaged,  amid  the  pressure  of  our  preoccupation  we 
lose  our  souls.  That  phrase  used  to  be  applied 
chiefly  to  the  next  world.  However  that  may  be,  it 
certainly  applies  to  this  one.  Men  lose  their  souls 
• — smother  them,  neglect  them,  maltreat  them, 
crowd  them  out.  As  Richard  Burton  sings, 

If  I  had  the  time  to  find  a  place 

And  sit  me  down  full  face  to  face 


MINDING  ONE’S  OWN  BUSINESS  103 


With  my  better  self,  that  cannot  show 
In  my  daily  life  that  rushes  so: 

It  might  be  then  I  would  see  my  soul 
Was  stumbling  still  toward  the  shining  goal; 

I  might  be  nerved  by  the  thought  sublime — 

If  I  had  the  time! 

Multitudes  of  people  so  lose  their  souls. 

Such  folk  are  headed  in  toward  inevitable  self- 
reproach.  For  the  soul  is  like  a  lighthouse.  There 
are  times  when  to  some  people  it  does  not  seem  in¬ 
dispensable.  The  coastline  is  familiar,  the  skies  are 
fair,  the  breeze  is  light  and  the  waters  calm.  But 
times  do  come  even  to  such  folk  when  the  gales 
rise,  the  night  closes  in,  the  waters  are  riotous,  and 
the  lighthouse,  which  but  a  few  hours  before  seemed 
to  be  negligible,  becomes  their  only  hope. 

So,  too,  no  man  will  altogether  escape  the  more 
serious  aspects  of  life.  Troubles  come,  when  we 
need  our  souls.  Temptations  like  bandits  out  of 
ambush  leap  on  us  to  steal  our  honor  from  us,  or 
work  grows  monotonous  and  wearisome  and  a  secret 
loathing  and  distaste  for  life  haunt  us,  and  we  need 
our  souls.  And  death  comes  at  last — that  “dark 
mother  always  gliding  near  with  soft  feet” — and 
when  she  touches  us  we  want  our  souls. 

v 

Indeed,  even  in  the  most  ordinary  days  there  is 
for  men  of  insight  no  escaping  this  innermost  prob- 


104  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

lem  of  life.  Each  of  us  is  continually  building  from 
within  out,  constructing  from  the  materials  which 
the  soul  gathers  out  of  the  world  the  real  world  in 
which  each  lives.  There  are  over  five  million  people 
in  the  City  of  New  York — but  in  which  City  of 
New  York?  There  are  almost  as  many  New  Yorks 
as  there  are  people  there.  There  is  a  New  York  of 
business,  bounded  on  the  north  by  stocks  and  on  the 
south  by  bonds.  There  is  a  New  York  of  music, 
where  are  some  people  who  know  that  man  cannot 
live  by  bread  alone.  There  is  a  New  York  of  fashion 
that  goes  back  and  forth  like  a  shuttle  between  the 
milliner  on  the  one  side  and  the  caterer  on  the 
other.  There  is  a  New  York  of  education,  where 
the  spirit  is  not  altogether  dead  that  made  Pesta- 
lozzi  live  “as  a  beggar  among  beggars — that  beggars 
might  live  like  men.”  There  is  a  New  York  of 
sport  that  looks  upon  the  Polo  Grounds  as  the  very 
hub  of  the  universe.  And  there  is  the  New  York  of 
religion,  where  are  some  people  who  are  sure  that 
the  chief  end  of  man  is  to  glorify  God  and  enjoy 
him  forever. 

Even  such  a  rough  division  of  New  York  is  super¬ 
ficial  in  comparison  with  the  facts  of  our  individual 
lives.  Each  lives  in  his  own  New  York.  He  made  it. 
His  soul  gathered  out  the  materials  of  which  it  is 
built,  and  there  he  lives.  Alike  the  glory  and 
tragedy  of  life  are  to  be  found  here:  each  of  us 


MINDING  ONE’S  OWN  BUSINESS  105 

lives  in  the  world  of  his  own  soul.  When  Oliver 
Goldsmith  was  so  poor  that  he  could  not  make  both 
ends  meet,  he  had  to  live  in  a  room  below  the  level 
of  the  street.  One  day  a  contemptible  boor  laughed 
at  him  for  it.  “You  lodge  in  a  basement/’  said  the 
boor.  And  Goldsmith  came  back  like  lightning: 
“Your  soul  must  lodge  in  a  basement.” 

That  is  certainly  the  correct  address  of  a  good 
many  souls,  and  all  true  seers  have,  like  Whittier, 
found  in  that  fact  the  central  tragedy  of  life : 

Oh,  doom  beyond  the  saddest  guess, 

As  the  long  years  of  God  unroll 
To  make  thy  dreary  selfishness 
The  prison  of  a  soul! 

One  suspects,  therefore,  that  religion  has  a  long 
while  yet  to  run  before  its  work  is  over.  For  in  its 
innermost  and  intensest  meaning  religion  has  con¬ 
cerned  itself  with  the  release,  emancipation,  salva¬ 
tion,  growth  of  the  soul.  Behind  its  disguises  of 
theory  and  ritual,  all  great  religion  has  one  common 
center:  it  sees  human  life  as  the  adventure  of  the 
soul.  Its  insistent  question  always  is:  “For  what 
shall  it  profit  a  man,  if  he  shall  gain  the  whole  world, 
and  lose  his  own  soul?”  To  religious  insight  the 
most  important  truth  about  man  is  that  he  has  been 
entrusted  with  himself,  capable  on  the  one  hand  of 
dismal  failure,  or  on  the  other  of  high  adventure 


106  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


into  the  life  that  is  life  indeed.  A  dog  can  make 
a  failure  of  himself,  but  not  much  of  a  failure.  A 
man,  however,  as  any  one  who  keeps  his  eyes  open 
can  see,  can  fail  until,  like  Milton’s  Satan,  he  cries, 
“Myself  am  hell,”  or  he  can  succeed  until  the  spirit¬ 
ual  world  shines  through  him  like  the  sun  through 
eastern  windows. 

All  great  religion  sets  men  at  life’s  central  task 
of  grappling  with  themselves.  It  has  supplied  the 
motive  and  driving  power,  the  insight  and  hope,  so 
that  men  have  been  able  to  grapple  with  themselves 
successfully.  At  its  height  it  has  led  men  to  the 
place  where  they  not  so  much  wrestle  with  them¬ 
selves  as  are  wrestled  with  by  the  Life  from  whom 
their  spirits  came,  to  be  conquered  by  whom  is 
victory  and  to  serve  whom  is  freedom.  And  it  will 
be  an  evil  day  for  the  world  if  ever  materialistic 
philosophy  or  practical  paganism  quenches  this  es¬ 
sential  challenge  of  religion. 

Build  thee  more  stately  mansions,  0  my  soul, 

As  the  swift  seasons  roll! 

Leave  thy  low-vaulted  past! 

Let  each  new  temple,  nobler  than  the  last, 

Shut  thee  from  heaven  with  a  dome  more  vast, 

Till  thou  at  length  art  free, 

Leaving  thine  outgrown  shell  by  life’s  unresting  sea! 


Obedience 


I 

NE  of  our  most  venerated  and  farseeing 
citizens  recently  remarked  that  in  his 
eighty  years  of  active  life,  associated  with 
some  of  the  most  stirring  events  in  the 
commonwealth,  he  had  never  seen  such  an  orgy  of 
lawlessness  as  that  through  which  we  are  living  now. 
Startled  into  thoughtfulness  by  this  assertion,  I 
made  some  interesting  discoveries:  that  I  could  not 
recall  ever  having  preached  a  sermon  on  obedience  ; 
that  I  could  not  recall  ever  having  heard  a  sermon 
on  obedience;  that,  when  I  searched  volume  after 
volume  of  modern  addresses  and  sermons,  I  did  not 
run  upon  any  that  dealt  with  respect  for  and  obedi¬ 
ence  to  authority.  There  were  plenty  on  freedom, 
on  the  emancipation  of  the  individual,  on  the  out¬ 
growing  of  old  restraints,  but  few,  if  any,  upon  the 
necessity  and  glory  of  being  mastered  by  what  right¬ 
fully  masters  us.  The  impression  began  to  sink 
in  that  our  orgy  of  lawlessness  is  not  an  accident,  nor 
merely  a  postwar  psychological  reaction,  but  that 
it  is  the  natural  fruitage  of  deep-rooted  tendencies 

107 


108 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


in  our  thinking  which  have  affected  alike  our  religion 
and  our  law. 

That  lawlessness  is  rampant  needs  no  long  demon¬ 
stration.  Consider  the  fact  that  in  the  United 
States  in  the  last  thirty-five  years  we  have  lynched 
over  three  thousand  people,  shooting  them,  hanging 
them,  burning  them,  and  sometimes  distributing 
pieces  of  their  charred  bones  for  souvenirs.  If  one 
wishes  to  get  the  full  effect  of  that  fact  let  him  not 
take  it  sitting  comfortably  in  a  peaceable  suburban 
home;  let  him  imagine  himself  in  Tokio  giving  good 
Christian  admonition  to  a  liberal  Japanese  about 
the  cruel  mistakes  of  Japan  in  Korea.  When  this 
admirable  advice  has  been  delivered,  the  Japanese, 
with  inimitable  courtesy,  has  his  answer  ready.  “You 
are  entirely  right,”  he  says.  “We  all  have  lament¬ 
able  mistakes  to  regret.  By  the  way,  I  have  forgot¬ 
ten  how  many  people  you  lynched  in  your  own 
Christian  country  last  year.”  What  shall  we  say? 
We  should  like  to  fail  back  upon  the  lame  excuse 
that  lynching  is  swift  vengeance  for  one  unspeakable 
crime,  but  the  fact  is  that  scores  of  people  are  being 
lynched  who  are  not  even  suspected  of  that  special 
iniquity.  We  should  like  to  plead  the  difficulty  of 
dealing  with  the  color  line  in  this  country,  but  the 
fact  is  in  the  last  thirty-five  years  over  a  thousand 
white  people  have  been  lynched.  There  is  no  ex¬ 
cuse.  Lynching  is  cruel,  uncivilized  lawlessness. 


OBEDIENCE  109 

Or  consider  our  criminal  record.  In  1916 — it  was 
not  an  unusual  year — Chicago  with  its  two  millions 
and  a  half  of  inhabitants  had  twenty  more  murders 
than  the  whole  of  Great  Britain  and  Wales  with 
their  thirty-eight  million  people,  and  in  the  same 
year  the  city  of  New  York  had  exactly  six  times  as 
many  culpable  homicides  as  the  city  of  London.  In 
the  United  States  in  1916  there  were  8372  culpable 
homicides  and  115  executions;  in  1917,  7803  culp¬ 
able  homicides  and  85  executions;  in  1918,  7667 
culpable  homicides  and,  once  more,  85  executions. 

We  have  heard  a  great  deal  about  the  breakdown 
of  the  church,  but  no  breakdown  so  threatens  the 
foundations  of  social  order  today  as  the  collapse  of 
our  law.  Ex-President  Taft  is  of  a  judicial  and  cau¬ 
tious  mind,  yet  even  he  uses  this  strong  and  urgent 
language:  “It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  the  ad¬ 
ministration  of  criminal  law  in  this  country  is  a  dis¬ 
grace  to  our  civilization,  and  that  the  prevalence  of 
crime  and  fraud,  which  here  is  greatly  in  excess 
of  that  in  European  countries,  is  due  largely  to  the 
failure  of  the  law  and  its  administration  to  bring 
criminals  to  justice.” 

The  movies,  our  most  popular  recreation,  are  a 
weather  vane  to  show  which  way  the  wind  is  blowing 
in  the  thinking  of  our  people,  and,  so  far  as  lawless¬ 
ness  is  concerned,  the  direction  is  obvious.  The  rep¬ 
resentatives  of  the  law  are  habitually  at  a  disadvan- 


110  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

tage  on  the  screen.  The  judge,  the  detective,  the 
policeman  come  off  badly  in  the  plot,  and  the  mere 
husband  is  often  in  ill  repute  with  the  audience. 
But  ah !  The  attractive  murderers,  the  high-minded 
robbers,  the  noble  crooks,  the  gracious  courtesans! 
The  church  is  often  accused  of  sentimentality.  After 
watching  the  cinema,  however,  one  suspects  that  in 
this  regard  it  is  fairly  safe  to  risk  the  church.  It  is 
clear,  however,  that  outside  the  church  we  are  having 
a  veritable  debauch  of  public  sentimentality  ex¬ 
pressing  itself  in  silly  exaltation  of  crime. 

ii 

In  the  United  States  today  probably  the  most 
obvious  lawlessness  with  which  we  deal  is  the  break¬ 
ing  of  the  Eighteenth  Amendment  and  its  enacting 
laws.  If  someone  insists  that  the  passage  of  the 
Eighteenth  Amendment  was  not  wise  the  answer 
may  be  assent.  One  may  hate  the  liquor  traffic  and 
desire  its  obliteration,  and  yet  may  feel  sure  that  had 
we  gone  on  for  a  decade  more  with  our  local-option 
campaigns  and  their  associated  programs  of  educa¬ 
tion  we  should  have  been  further  on  toward  real 
temperance  and  ultimate  prohibition  than  we  are 
now. 

Nevertheless,  the  attempt  summarily  to  put  down 
the  liquor  traffic  at  one  stroke  is  on  our  statute  books. 


OBEDIENCE 


111 

It  is  the  law,  and  no  man  can  convincingly  maintain 
that  the  majority  of  the  people  did  not  want  it 
there.  To  say  that  is  to  vest  our  senators  and  rep¬ 
resentatives  with  ideal  virtues  quite  beyond  their 
just  desert.  It  involves  picturing  them  as  men  of 

such  valiant  and  sacrificial  devotion  to  total  absti- 

* 

nence  that  in  the  face  of  a  popular  majority,  at  the 
risk  of  losing  their  seats,  they  insisted,  out  of  their 
own  impatient  idealism,  on  passing  the  prohibitory 
laws  and  keeping  them  on  the  books  against  all  pro¬ 
tests.  One  who  believes  that  must  have  the  inno¬ 
cence  of  an  infant.  The  truth  is  that  many  votes 
w'ere  cast  for  prohibition,  not  because  our  senators 
and  representatives  believed  in  it  themselves,  but 
because  they  well  knew  that  a  majority  of  the 
people  did. 

It  is  undoubtedly  justifiable  at  times  to  break  the 
law.  My  grandfather  broke  one — the  Fugitive  Slave 
Law*.  He  deliberately  transgressed  a  Federal  en¬ 
actment  which  made  it  illegal  to  assist  an  escaping 
slave  to  liberty.  On  stormy  nights,  aroused  by  a 
signal  on  the  windowpane,  he  would  rise  and  go  out 
to  row  boatloads  of  fleeing  slaves  across  the  Niagara 
River  into  Canada.  He  conscientiously  broke  a 
Federal  law  because  he  thought  that  he  ought  to 
obey  God  rather  than  men. 

Does  anyone  maintain,  however,  that  bootlegging 
represents  any  such  self-denying  devotion  to  Chris- 


112  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


tian  principles,  that  folk  are  drinking  hooch  as  a 
sacrificial  libation  to  their  high  ideals?  Recently  I 
saw  a  man  breaking  the  law.  He  was  proclaiming 
aloud  his  right  to  personal  liberty.  He  had  had  so 
much  of  it  that  he  was  not  lucid  and  logical  in  his 
argument,  but  it  was  obvious  that  he  was  endeavor¬ 
ing  to  cloak  transgression  of  law  under  the  sacred 
right  to  personal  freedom.  One  who  watched  him. 
however,  labored  under  the  strong  suspicion  that  he 
broke  the  law,  not  really  for  conscience’s  sake,  but 
for  appetite’s  sake ! 

It  is  one  thing  to  put  God  above  law.  Once  in  a 
great  while  that  may  be  solemnly,  sacrificially  neces¬ 
sary.  But  to  put  appetite  for  hard  liquor  above  law 
is  another  matter.  And  the  shame  of  the  present 
situation  is  that  the  law  is  not  being  chiefly  out¬ 
raged  by  poor  people;  it  is  not  they  who  are  sup¬ 
porting  half  the  population  of  the  West  Indies.  Our 
lawlessness  is  mainly  the  work  of  men  of  means, 
prestige  and  influence,  who  ought  to  know  better. 

The  following  is  suggested  as  a  necessary  element 
in  the  loyalty  of  a  good  citizen  just  now: 

I  hate  the  liquor  traffic  and  all  the  damnation  that  it 
brings  on  human  life;  I  recognize  the  right  of  the  Gov¬ 
ernment,  when  the  majority  so  wills,  to  put  down  the 
liquor  traffic,  as  it  does  a  contagious  disease,  even 
though  that  involves  the  right  to  invade  my  home  and 
take  my  child  to  an  isolation  hospital;  I  claim  the  right 


OBEDIENCE 


113 


to  agitate  for  the  law’s  rephrasing  and  amendment, 
where  I  think  it  needs  it,  that  it  may  be  more  reasonable 
and  enforceable;  but  in  the  meantime  I  will  keep  the 
law. 


ill 

As  to  the  sources  from  which  our  personal  law¬ 
lessness  springs,  one  of  them  is  obviously  to  be  found 
in  the  breakdown  of  authority  in  the  state  and  the 
rise  of  a  rampant  and  selfish  individualism.  Indeed, 
this  excessive  individualism  has  often  been  taken 
as  the  sign  manual  of  a  true  American.  Mr.  John 
Graham  Brooks  tells  of  a  dairyman  in  New  Hamp¬ 
shire  who,  irritated  by  the  strict  requirements  of 
cleanliness  on  which  the  state  milk  inspector  insisted, 
broke  out  in  righteous  indignation.  “Yes,”  he  said, 
“I  have  read  a  good  deal  in  the  agricultural  paper 
about  this  foolishness;  but  I  am  an  American,  and  I 
propose  to  stay  on  bein’  an  American.”  A  very 
popular  idea  of  one  hundred  per  cent  Americanism 
is  involved  in  such  a  claim  that  one  must  have  in¬ 
dividual  liberty  to  sell  the  public  milk  just  as  un¬ 
clean  as  one  feels  like  selling  it.  Unless  American¬ 
ism,  however,  can  be  made  to  mean  less  individual 
liberty  and  more  social  obligation,  the  republic  is 
headed  in  for  perilous  times. 

Across  the  front  of  the  courthouse  in  Worcester, 
Massachusetts,  runs  in  great  letters  the  inscription : 


114  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


“Obedience  to  Law  is  Liberty.”  That  truth  is  the 
foundation  of  the  democratic  experiment.  Long  ago 
our  fathers  dared  to  believe  in  and  to  undertake  a 
great  venture  of  faith — no  greater  idea  ever  dawned 
on  the  political  consciousness  of  the  race — that  not 
the  king  but  the  whole  body  of  the  people  should 
make  the  laws,  which  then  the  whole  body  of  the 
people  gladly  would  obey.  That  idea,  not  a  wild 
and  wayward  individualism,  is  the  true  basis  of 
democracy,  and  the  success  of  it  demands  loyalty, 
self-denying  devotion  and  obedience.  There  is  no 
magic  by  which  the  democratic  experiment  can  be 
saved  if  mad  insistence  on  individual  liberty  con¬ 
tinues  to  crowd  out  sober  recognition  of  social  ob¬ 
ligation. 

If  the  readers  of  this  article  were  likely  to  be 
economically  rebellious  against  the  present  social 
system,  tempted  to  Bolshevism  as  a  philosophy  and 
to  physical  violence  as  a  method,  warnings  about  the 
futility  of  TNT  as  an  agency  for  social  betterment 
might  be  in  order.  But  since  most  of  us,  so  far  from 
being  red,  are  not  even  pink,  we  need  to  recognize 
that  lawlessness  is  not  simply  a  matter  of  physical 
violence.  When  lawlessness  emerges  in  connection 
with  a  strike,  rising  at  times  to  the  dimensions  of  a 
massacre,  we  are  shocked.  The  outrage  is  visible, 
violent,  murderous.  Yet  it  is  worth  our  while  to 
listen  to  the  excuse  which  the  perpetrators  of  such 


OBEDIENCE 


115 

lawless  deeds  offer,  even  if  we  do  not  easily  sym¬ 
pathize  with  it.  “Millions  of  us,”  they  say,  “have 
nothing  to  fight  with  except  our  fists.  Our  own 
combined  physical  force  is  the  only  weapon  we 
possess.  The  men  above  us  do  not  need  to  fight 
with  their  fists  because  they  have  so  many  other  in¬ 
struments  of  warfare — money,  influence,  soldiers, 
lawyers,  corporations  that  can  control  and  evade  law. 
How  can  you  blame  us  when,  driven  into  a  corner, 
we  fight  with  the  only  thing  we  have  to  fight  with?” 

As  an  excuse  that  is  unconvincing;  as  an  indict¬ 
ment  it  is  searching.  Probably  the  most  perilous 
lawlessness  in  this  country  now  is  in  high  circles. 
There  was  an  old  type  of  lawyer  whose  glory  was 
that  he  was  a  servant  of  the  law.  He  devoted  him¬ 
self  to  that  master  with  something  of  the  chivalry 
which  old  knights  felt  for  their  feudal  lords.  He 
honored  the  law,  and  to  see  that  it  was  respected  and 
obeyed  was  his  meat  and  drink.  That  kind  of  lawyer 
we  still  have  with  us  and,  as  always,  he  is  the  glory 
of  his  great  profession.  But,  like  weeds  in  an  un¬ 
tended  garden,  another  kind  of  lawyer  has  sprung 
up.  His  business  is  not  to  interpret  the  law  but 
to  evade  it;  not  to  tell  us  what  it  means  but  to  make 
it  mean  something  else;  not  to  show  us  where  the 
highroad  of  legal  honor  runs  but  where  are  all  the 
bypaths  and  crosscuts  by  which  the  highroad  may  be 
escaped.  That  kind  of  lawyer  thrives  in  droves  be- 


116  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

cause  other  men  make  it  abundantly  worth  his  while. 
One  does  not  need  two  eyes  to  see  lawlessness  that 
works,  not  with  fists  but  with  legal  fictions,  not  with 
TNT  but  with  technicalities,  that  evades  law  in 
ways  too  clever  by  a  mile,  plays  ducks  and  drakes 
with  law,  and  does  it  all  smoothly  and  politely,  as 
in  Denmark  “one  may  smile,  and  smile,  and  be  a 
villain.” 

No  one  who  possesses  any  influence  at  all  is  likely 
long  to  escape  this  test  of  character.  During  the 
war,  to  be  sure,  we  were  very  patriotic.  The  Gov¬ 
ernment  could  ask  of  us  nothing  too  hard.  We  felt 
a  heavy  sense  of  social  obligation.  The  nation 
never  needed  that  devotion  more  than  she  needs  it 
now.  These  next  years  are  likely  to  be  critical  in 
her  history.  We  are  skirting  dangerous  precipices. 
We  need  a  new  baptism  of  social  obligation,  disci¬ 
plined  living,  loyalty  to  the  common  good,  obedience 
to  law. 

IV 

Our  prevalent  lawlessness  springs  not  simply  from 
a  breakdown  of  authority  in  the  state,  but  from  a 
breakdown  of  authority  in  the  family.  As  another 
has  put  it,  there  is  just  as  much  authority  in  the 
family  as  there  ever  was,  only  the  children  exercise 
it.  In  saying  this  we  do  not  need  to  make  a  weak 
and  wistful  appeal  for  the  “good  old  times.”  The 


OBEDIENCE 


117 

family  life  of  older  generations  often  had  in  it  ele¬ 
ments  which  we  are  fortunate  to  have  escaped.  Here, 
for  example,  is  a  letter  written  in  1803  by  a  Quaker 
lady,  sending  her  brother  Timothy  to  live  with  rela¬ 
tives  in  another  town: 

“Esteemed  Friend:  I  send  my  brother  Timothy  to  be 
under  thy  charge  this  winter,  while  he  learns  the  store 
business.  I  know  thee  will  be  a  faithful  guardian, 
and  though  it  grieveth  me  to  unveil  his  faults,  I  must 
disclose  them  for  thy  friendly  correction.  I  have  dis¬ 
covered  in  the  lad  a  worldly  and  evil  spirit,  having  heard 
him  imitate  the  unprofitable  forms  of  the  light  folk  of 
this  town — even  saying  “Mr.  Jones”  to  old  Friend 
Thomas  Jones,  and  though  only  sixteen  years  old,  he 
boldly  and  audaciously  directed  the  woman  who  maketh 
his  garments  to  alter  their  shape.  These  are  bad  signs, 
but  I  hope  thee  will  prune  away  such  sprouts  of  sin, 
and  curb  these  longings  after  vanity.  In  other  matters 
thee  will  find  the  lad  obedient  and  correct. 

“I  send  thee,  Rufus,  a  present  of  a  hat,  which  I  hope 
thee  will  think  good  enough,  as  my  deceased  brother, 
Isaac,  wore  it  for  six  years.  Rebecca  Ann  was  at  meet¬ 
ing  last  First  Day,  with  a  red  ribbon  on  her  hat;  this 
caused  great  excitement.  Friends  will  deal  with  her, 
and  try  to  uproot  such  evil  spirit,  which  flames  out  of 
her  heart.  Everybody  is  sorry  on  account  of  her  Aunt 
Tabitha,  that  strict  model  of  righteousness,  who  will 
not  let  even  a  red  rose  grow  in  her  garden. 

“I  shall  be  pleased  to  hear  how  thy  family  does,  and 
also  how  brother  Timothy  conducts  himself. 

“We  do  not  mean  to  put  him  upon  thee  without  com- 


118  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

pensation,  and  we  are  willing  to  pay  a  liberal  board — 
say  $1.50  a  week,  deducting  .25  when  he  spends  Sunday 
with  his  Uncle  Caleb. 

“Wishing  thee  well,  and  all  thy  family  .  . 

Not  many  of  us  would  care  to  go  back  to  such 
“good  old  times.”  Yet  in  the  best  of  those  old 
homes,  from  which  some  of  us  came,  there  w^as  a 
kind  of  spiritual  authority  which  we  shall  lose  at  our 
peril.  One  Saturday  morning  my  father,  leaving 
the  house,  said  to  my  mother:  “You  tell  Harry  that 
he  can  cut  the  grass  today — if  he  feels  like  it.”  Then 
after  a  few  steps,  he  turned  and  added:  “Tell  him 
that  he  would  better  feel  like  it.”  Just  so !  The  first 
part  of  those  directions  has  had  altogether  too  ex¬ 
clusive  control  of  the  training  of  the  younger  gen¬ 
eration.  They  could  do  their  duty  if  they  felt  like  it. 
They  could  study,  work,  behave  themselves — if  they 
felt  like  it.  It  will  be  a  sad  day  for  our  families 
and  for  the  nation  if  we  cannot  recover  that  second 
emphasis:  they  would  better  jeel  like  it! 

To  be  sure,  that  kind  of  authority  in  the  home 
must  be  spiritually  grounded.  It  can  be  no  mere 
imposition  of  arbitrary  will.  I  took  that  from  my 
father  and  laughed  over  it  all  the  while  I  cut  the 
grass,  because  he  was  my  closest  chum,  my  best 
friend,  and  I  had  heard  him  pray  for  me  when  I  was 
certain  that  he  meant  it.  So  Carlyle  described  the 
strongest  spiritual  influence  of  his  youth — his 


OBEDIENCE 


119 

mother’s  praying.  “The  highest  whom  I  knew  on 
Earth/’  he  wrote,  “I  here  saw  bowed  down,  with 
awe  unspeakable,  before  a  Higher  in  heaven:  Such 
things,  especially  in  infancy,  reach  inwards  to  the 
very  core  of  your  being.” 

We  are  coming  closer  home  to  the  secret  sources 
of  our  lawless  times.  No  political  maneuvering 
alone  will  get  us  out;  nothing  but  the  reestablish¬ 
ment  of  the  spiritual  authority  of  the  American 
home. 

v 

Lawlessness  has  its  source  not  simply  in  the  break¬ 
down  of  authority  within  the  state  and  the  family, 
but  within  the  individual  as  well.  When  lawless 
citizenship  and  lawless  homes  have  been  properly 
assayed  we  must  get  back  to  the  root  of  the  matter 
in  lawless  character.  Dwight  L.  Moody  made  fa¬ 
mous  his  definition  of  character  as  “what  a  man  is  in 
the  dark.”  What  a  man  is  in  the  dark,  however, 
depends  altogether  on  whether  he  has  something 
inside  his  life  whose  right  to  command  him  he  ac¬ 
knowledges,  and  whose  commands,  even  in  the  dark, 
he  stands  ready  to  obey.  Some  men  we  trust  ab¬ 
solutely;  to  know  such  men  is  life’s  most  reassuring 
experience.  As  Emerson  says:  “The  world  is  up¬ 
held  by  the  veracity  of  good  men;  they  make  the 
earth  wholesome.”  And  always  in  such  men,  as  the 


120  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

secret  of  their  reliability,  we  find  an  inward  sense 
of  honor,  sense  of  duty,  sense  of  God,  to  which  they 
would  subscribe  themselves,  as  our  fathers  signed 
their  letters:  “I  am,  sir,  your  most  obedient  serv¬ 
ant.” 

Obedience  is  the  core  of  character. 

The  most  tragic  sight  in  the  world  is  young  men 
and  women  who  do  not  discover  that  until  it  is 
too  late.  They  begin,  as  youth  so  often  begins,  with 
unspoiled  characters  and  unsmirched  reputations 
and,  utterly  failing  to  appreciate  their  opportunity, 
by  lawless  living  they  throw  their  chance  away. 
They  fail  to  see  that  it  is  far  easier  to  keep  character 
when  you  have  it  than  to  recover  it  when  it  is  lost. 

Much  talk  about  character  is  taken  up  with  the 
sins  that  have  been  committed,  the  evil  that  has 
been  done,  and  with  the  pardon  and  restoration  that 
are  waiting  for  the  returning  sinner.  There  ought 
to  be  more  emphasis  on  the  sins  that  never  have 
been  committed,  the  impurities  that  have  not  yet 
stained  the  life,  and  on  the  greatness  of  the  oppor¬ 
tunity  which  belongs  to  a  fine  youth  on  that  account. 
Recovery  from  sin  is  a  terrific  process.  When  the 
gospel  of  pardon  for  the  penitent  prodigal  has  been 
fully  appreciated,  it  still  remains  true  that  recover¬ 
ing  lost  character  and  lost  reputation  involves  an 
appalling  struggle.  Sin  has  binding  power,  and  the 
grip  of  its  habits  is  tremendous.  Sin  has  blinding 


OBEDIENCE 


121 

power,  and  eyes  once  perverted  by  it  do  not  easily 
regain  the  grace  of  seeing  straight.  Sin  has  mul¬ 
tiplying  power,  and  each  sin  spawns  other  sins  like 
fish  in  the  sea  until  it  seems  impossible  to  be  rid 
of  them.  Sin  has  hardening  power;  it  callouses  the 
soul  until  the  spiritual  touch  which  once  would  have 
roused  us  leaves  us  dead.  To  get  out  of  sin,  when 
once  you  are  in  it,  is  a  terrific  process. 

When,  therefore,  one  sees  a  youth,  not  yet  caught, 
not  yet  mastered  by  evil  habit,  walking  at  large, 
a  moral  freeman,  one  wonders  if  he  half  appreciates 
the  splendor  of  his  opportunity.  So  many  sermons 
have  been  preached  on  the  glory  of  the  ProdigaFs 
return;  so  few  upon  the  glory  of  his  chance  before 
he  went  away  at  all. 

The  most  desirable  thing  in  the  world  is  not  the 
home-coming  of  a  prodigal ;  the  most  desirable  thing 
is  a  youth  who  keeps  his  character  by  obedience  to 
the  highest  that  he  knows,  and  never  has  the  bitter 
struggle  of  coming  back. 

It  is  a  great  deal  easier  to  use  an  opportunity 
when  you  have  it  than  to  regain  it  when,  by  lawless¬ 
ness,  it  has  been  thrown  away. 

VI 

Religion  has  an  indispensable  function  to  perform 
in  this  building  of  obedient  character.  For  what- 


122  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

ever  else  God  may  mean,  he  certainly  means  that 
in  this  universe  and  in  our  own  lives  there  is  Some¬ 
body  who  ought  to  be  and  who  proposes  to  be 
obeyed. 

Almost  every  aspect  of  God’s  significance  for 
human  life  has  been  pushed  to  the  fore  in  our  gen¬ 
eration,  except  this.  We  have  made  him  very  ami¬ 
able,  very  approachable,  even  affectionately  ma¬ 
ternal,  and  we  often  have  forgotten  that,  whatever 
else  God  means,  he  represents  moral  order.  He  is 
no  friend  of  undisciplined  living. 

They  say  that  the  Bolsheviki  in  Moscow  held  high 
celebration  on  last  Christmas  Day;  that  they 
marched  through  the  streets  with  a  stuffed  figure 
marked  “Almighty  God,”  at  the  head  of  the  proces¬ 
sion,  and  then  burned  “Almighty  God”  in  effigy. 
Whether  the  story  is  true  or  not,  this  certainly  is 
clear:  if  anybody  wishes  to  live  an  undisciplined 
life  he  would  better  start  in  by  getting  rid  of  God; 
for  so  long  as  he  is  here  the  Eternal  Right  exists 
which  ought  to  be  obeyed. 

Nor  is  this  a  hard  gospel.  It  is  a  glorious  gospel. 
The  secret  of  all  our  material  progress  has  lain  in 
our  discovery  that  the  physical  universe  is  a  law- 
abiding  system.  All  scientific  advance  depends  on 
obedience  to  law. 

And  all  high  character  depends  on  inward  obedi¬ 
ence  to  moral  law.  It  is  just  here  that  we  often  miss 


OBEDIENCE  123 

the  substance  of  Jesus’  character.  We  are  touched 
by  his  gentleness,  pity,  compassion,  kindness,  but 
the  core  of  his  character  lies  underneath.  “Thy 
will  be  done,  as  in  heaven,  so  on  earth”;  “I  came 
down  from  heaven,  not  to  do  mine  own  will,  but 
the  will  of  him  that  sent  me”;  “Whosoever  shall  do 
the  will  of  God,  the  same  is  my  brother,  and  my 
sister,  and  mother”;  “Not  my  will,  but  thine,  be 
done.”  At  the  center  of  the  Master’s  life  was  a 
glad  but  tremendous  obedience  to  his  Father’s  will. 

Indeed,  one  of  the  chief  services  which  the  Master 
has  rendered  his  followers  is  to  redeem  obedience 
from  forbidding  severity  and  to  make  of  it  a  glad 
and  winsome  loyalty.  He  has  so  exhibited  the  moral 
life  at  its  best  as  to  make  men  fall  in  love  with  it. 
He  has  said,  not  “Go!  Obey  duty,  ‘Stern  Daughter 
of  the  Voice  of  God,’”  but  “Come!  Follow  me.” 
He  has  aroused  in  men  a  devotion  to  himself  and  a 
patriotism  for  his  cause  which  have  put  into  fol¬ 
lowing  him  the  kind  of  thrill  and  adventurous  joy 
which  soldiers  have  felt  in  campaigning  with  a  gen¬ 
eral  for  whom  they  would  gladly  die.  At  infinite 
cost  men  have  obeyed  him,  as  the  highest  that  they 
knew,  but  they  have  thought  of  him  as  one,  “whose 
service  is  perfect  freedom.” 


Above  the  Average 


I 

EMOCRACY  is  not  all  clear  gain.  For 
one  thing,  its  method  of  reaching  deci¬ 
sions  by  voting  creates  the  general 
*  impression  that  the  majority  is  right. 
From  a  ladies’  sewing  circle  to  the  assembly  of 
the  League  of  Nations  we  count  heads  when  we 
wish  a  matter  settled.  The  result  is  that  we 
modern  democrats,  who  would  scorn  to  truckle 
to  an  autocrat,  truckle  to  the  majority  with  all 
the  obsequiousness  of  a  courtier  before  his  sover¬ 
eign.  Once  the  fashions  were  set  by  a  monarch 
— the  king  could  do  no  wrong.  If  he  wore  a  beard, 
beards  were  fashionable;  if  he  wore  a  ruff  to  cover 
a  scar,  ruffs  were  the  order  of  the  day.  Democracy, 
however,  which  has  largely  abolished  this  mimicry 
of  kings,  has  for  many  folk  only  substituted  mimicry 
of  the  mob.  We  do  not  go  through  the  outward 
ritual  of  kneeling  to  Their  Majesties,  but  in  fact  we 
continually  bow  before  the  two  great  sovereigns  of 

124 


ABOVE  THE  AVERAGE  125 

the  democratic  state — The  General  Average  and  The 
Majority  Vote. 

In  political  procedure  it  doubtless  is  true  that 
the  best  way  yet  discovered  to  run  a  government 
is  to  elect  public  servants  by  popular  suffrage.  But 
to  grant  the  wisdom  of  political  democracy  is  a  very 
different  thing  from  saying  that  in  any  decision 
which  calls  for  spiritual  fineness  the  majority  is 
likely  to  be  right.  Upon  the  contrary,  the  majority 
is  almost  certain  to  be  wrong.  Put  to  popular  vote 
the  query,  which  they  enjoy  the  better,  ragtime  and 
jazz  on  the  one  side  or  Chopin’s  Nocturnes  on  the 
other,  and  where  would  the  majority  be?  Put  to 
popular  vote  the  query,  which  interests  them  more, 
the  movies  or  Hamlet  and  King  Lear,  and  where 
would  the  majority  be?  Which  are  more  popular, 
novels  written  by  animated  fountain  pens  that  turn 
out  love  stories  by  the  gross,  or  the  great  classics  of 
our  English  speech?  The  idea  that  the  voice  of  the 
people  is  the  voice  of  God  is  mostly  nonsense. 

The  fact  is  that  in  any  realm  where  judgment 
calls  for  spiritual  fineness  only  the  minority  who  are 
above  the  average  are  ever  right.  And  because  a 
man  is  always  tempted  to  live  down  to  the  average 
of  his  social  group,  a  searching  test  of  character  is 
involved  in  one’s  relationship  with  this  dead  level  of 
public  opinion  and  practice.  A  professor  in  one  of 

our  leading  universities,  questioned  as  to  the  peril 

/ 


126 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


which  most  threatens  our  young  men,  answered, 
“Law-morality.”  He  meant  that  they  are  content 
with  the  legal  standard  as  their  ideal.  They  desire 
to  be  no  worse  than  the  enforced  average,  but  they 
feel  no  call  to  be  any  better.  They  are  as  good  as  is 
necessary  to  “get  by.”  They  cannot  meet  that 
searching  test  which  every  democratic  state  presents 
to  its  members:  courage  to  live  above  the  average 
and  ahead  of  the  time.  In  the  last  article  we  pleaded 
for  obedience  to  law;  in  this  one  we  insist  that  that 
is  not  enough. 


ii 

The  kind  of  courage  involved  in  living  above  the 
average  is  indispensable  to  great  character.  Every 
organized  form  of  human  life  acts  on  us  in  two  ways : 
it  levels  up  our  worst,  and  it  levels  down  our  best. 
Government,  for  example,  is  simply  the  organization 
of  a  general  human  average  into  a  machinery  of 
power.  The  benefits  of  this  are  obvious:  govern¬ 
ment  forces  those  who  are  below  the  average  to  live 
up  to  it  or  else  suffer  the  consequences.  But  it 
also  tends  to  force  those  who  are  above  the  average 
to  live  down  to  it  or  else  suffer  the  consequences. 
For  this  reason  the  prisons  of  history  have  been 
filled  with  two  kinds  of  people,  the  worst  and  the 
best.  The  death  cell  in  Athens  had  in  it  the  scum  of 


ABOVE  THE  AVERAGE  127 

Attica,  but  also  Socrates,  the  wisest  soul  in  Greece. 
The  jail  in  Philippi  had  in  it  the  scoundrels  of  the 
countryside,  but  Paul  as  well,  the  apostle  of  the 
Christ.  Bedford  Jail  was  filled  with  debauchees,  but 
there,  too,  John  Bunyan  dreamed  “The  Pilgrim’s 
Progress.”  And  Worcester  Jail  contained  the  riffraff 
of  the  country,  but  George  Fox,  too,  father  of  the 
Quakers  and  a  man  of  peace. 

Even  in  our  own  day  it  has  not  always  been  easy 
for  governments  to  be  sure  when  they  were  locking 
up  our  saints  and  when  our  sinners.  For  always 
there  have  been  two  ways  of  falling  foul  of  a  human 
government:  one  by  being  a  rogue  and  the  other 
by  being  a  prophet.  The  governmental  standard  is 
like  a  Procrustean  bed :  it  does  call  for  the  stretching 
out  of  those  that  are  too  short,  but  it  also  calls  for 
the  lopping  off  of  those  that  are  too  long. 

This  double  activity  of  human  averages  should  be 
impressed  upon  Christians  every  time  they  think  of 
Calvary.  Three  crosses  stood  on  Calvary — on  two 
of  them  hung  robbers;  on  the  third  hung  Christ. 
The  Roman  government,  like  all  organized  forms 
of  human  life,  disliked  two  kinds  of  people — out¬ 
laws,  who  were  below  the  level  and  would  not  live 
up  to  it,  and  saviors,  who  were  above  the  level  and 
would  not  live  down  to  it.  We  may  well  ask  our¬ 
selves  where  we  would  have  stood  with  reference  to 
Calvary — below  the  average,  with  the  outlaws,  con- 


128  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

demned  by  the  general  body  of  public  opinion;  on 
the  average  with  the  multitude,  whose  organized 
public  opinion  slew  alike  robbers  and  Christ;  or 
above  the  average,  with  Christ  himself.  Only,  if 
we  had  been  with  him,  it  would  have  meant  then, 
as  now,  living  above  the  level  and  ahead  of  the 
time. 

Being  a  Christian  on  this  basis  is  serious  business. 
It  ought  to  be  serious  business.  “Christian”  is  too 
fine  a  word  to  be  misrepresented  as  it  often  is.  For 
here,  as  elsewhere,  manyy  different  meanings  can  be 
put  into  a  single  phrase.  We  say  “I  am  hungry 
and  thirsty,”  and  we  say  it  cheerily,  thinking  of  the 
dinner  soon  to  come.  But  when  a  man  who  had  lain 
two  days  and  nights  in  No  Man’s  Land  crawled 
into  the  first-line  trench,  he  also  said  “hungry  and 
thirsty.”  Same  words — different  thing!  We  speak 
of  “sacrifice,”  and  by  it  we  generally  mean  the  sur¬ 
render  of  some  minor  convenience  for  another’s 
comfort.  But  a  missionary  in  Central  China,  living 
year  after  year  amid  the  pressure  of  an  alien  civiliza¬ 
tion  on  a  frontier  post  where  he  hardly  hears  his 
mother  tongue,  is  also  sacrificing.  Same  word — 
different  thing! 

So  folk  call  themselves  Christians  and  often  mean 
by  it  no  more  than  the  dead  level  of  average  re¬ 
spectability.  Such  discipleship  could  hardly  have 
contented  him  who  said  “What  do  ye  more  than 


ABOVE  THE  AVERAGE_ 129 

others?”  “except  your  righteousness  shall  exceed  the 
righteousness  of  the  scribes  and  Pharisees,”  and  who, 
himself,  rather  than  live  down  to  the  level,  went  to 
the  cross.  In  the  intention  of  Jesus,  to  be  a  Chris¬ 
tian  obviously  involved  being  above  the  average 
and  ahead  of  the  time. 


hi 

When,  therefore,  we  have  recognized  that  lawless¬ 
ness  is  a  rampant  peril,  we  must  also  see  close 
alongside  it  the  multitudes  of  people  who  are  merely 
law-abiding,  who  accept  the  dead  level  of  general 
mediocrity  as  standard,  who  are  no  better  than 
the  enforced  average,  and  who  in  consequence  are 
living  alike  for  themselves  and  for  the  social 
welfare  utterly  unsatisfactory  lives. 

In  organized  business,  for  example,  it  is  not 
enough  thus  to  be  leveled  up  to  the  average ;  if  that 
is  all,  one  may  be  sure  that  he  is  being  leveled 
down  to  the  average.  For  business  tends  to  work 
both  ways  on  everyone  whom  it  touches.  That  busi¬ 
ness  levels  up  men’s  worst  seems  plain.  Japan  needs 
a  dominant  merchant  class  to  improve  her  ethics, 
and  for  a  simple  reason.  All  people  copy  the  virtues 
of  their  most  admired  class,  and  for  generations  war¬ 
riors  have  occupied  that  position  in  Japan.  The 
virtues  of  war  are  loyalty  and  valor,  and  in  those 


130  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


qualities  no  nation  today  surpasses  the  Japanese. 
But  the  virtues  of  war  are  not  truthfulness  and 
straightforwardness;  wars  are  largely  run  by  strata¬ 
gem  and  subtlety  and  subterfuge.  While,  therefore, 
truthfulness  is  honored  in  Japan,  it  is  not  honored 
so  highly  as  valor  and  loyalty  are,  nor  so  highly  as 
it  will  be  when  the  business  group  has  become  domi¬ 
nant  and  commercial  virtues  rise  correspondingly  in 
the  scale.  For  when  the  sins  against  honesty  and 
truthfulness  which  run  through  our  business  life 
have  been  properly  appraised  and  condemned,  it 
still  remains  true  that  business  cannot  be  done  on 
a  large  scale  without  an  immense  amount  of  honesty 
and  truthfulness  to  do  business  with.  Business 
unquestionably  levels  up. 

Like  every  other  organized  form  of  human  life, 
however,  it  also  levels  down.  It  often  makes  men 
hard,  selfish,  avaricious,  even  cruel.  It  often  sanc¬ 
tions  a  double  standard  of  morality  by  which  we 
run  our  lives  in  home  and  neighborhood  on  one 
set  of  principles  and  change  gear  entirely  when  we 
reach  the  office  or  the  factory.  It  continually  causes 
men  to  withstand  public  movements  of  reform  es¬ 
sential  to  the  common  weal,  because  they  threaten 
for  a  time  to  disturb  the  interests  of  property.  It 
makes  men  content  with  conditions,  like  the  twelve- 
hour  shift  in  industry,  that  are  evil,  because  they 
themselves  succeed  in  profiting  by  them.  The  down- 


ABOVE  THE  AVERAGE  131 

drag  of  the  competitive  and  profiteering  spirit  in 
business  on  the  best  in  men  and  women  is  one  of 
the  most  obvious  facts  in  the  modern  world. 

Millet,  the  French  artist,  who  gave  us  The  An- 
gelus,  was  addressed  at  his  wedding  dinner  by  his 
grandmother,  who  said  to  him:  “Remember,  my 
Frangois,  that  you  are  a  Christian  before  you  are  a 
painter.  .  .  .  Never  sacrifice  on  the  altar  of  Baal.” 
And  Millet  in  his  answer  said :  “Even  if  they  cover 
the  canvas  with  gold  and  ask  me  to  paint  a  'St. 
Francis  possessed  by  the  devil/  I  will  promise  you 
never  to  consent!” 

Everybody  needs  to  take  that  vow — that  he  will 
not  sell  out.  We  ministers  need  to  take  it.  Men  in 
politics  and  women  in  society,  and  those  who  live 
under  the  terrific  pressure  of  self-interest  in  the 
business  world  need  to  make  that  vow  their  own, 
that  they  will  not  sell  out.  What  is  finer  in  history 
than  a  soul  that  is  not  for  sale? 

As  for  our  industrial  and  business  problems  in 
their  social  aspects,  no  mere  suppression  of  lawless¬ 
ness  will  solve  them.  Probably  most  readers  of  this 
article  desire,  as  the  writer  does,  the  retention  of  the 
capitalistic  system  until  we  can  get  something 
plainly  better  to  put  in  its  place,  and  nothing  plainly 
better  appears  on  the  horizon  just  now.  Certainly, 
no  experiments  being  tried  with  socialism  make  it 
look  in  the  least  alluring.  But  this  serious  truth 


132  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


also  faces  us,  that,  whether  we  have  anything  better 
to  replace  it  or  not,  the  capitalistic  system  will  not 
easily  maintain  itself  unless  it  can  be  so  organized 
and  directed  as  to  serve  better  than  it  has  been 
serving  the  whole  body  of  the  people. 

A  lay  leader  of  a  men’s  class  in  a  metropolitan 
church  recently  refused  to  allow  industrial  problems 
to  be  discussed  before  his  group  because,  said  he, 
“the  situation  in  the  United  States  is  all  right — 
ninety-eight  per  cent  right.” 

What  absurdity!  With  gigantic  conflicts  between 
capital  and  labor  catching  the  general  body  of  the 
public  like  victims  between  two  millstones  and 
grinding  the  life  out  of  them;  with  the  most  in¬ 
timate  concerns  of  the  people’s  life,  such  as  coal, 
transportation,  and  food,  settled  not  by  the  peo¬ 
ple’s  elected  representatives  but  in  private  confer¬ 
ence  of  labor  leaders  and  captains  of  industry ;  with 
the  fear  of  unemployment  constantly  haunting  mil¬ 
lions  of  our  families  like  a  ghost,  and  the  fact  of 
unemployment  periodically  leaping  upon  them  like 
a  devil — ninety-eight  per  cent  right?  In  this  situa¬ 
tion,  to  repress  lawlessness  is  necessary,  but  it  is  not 
enough.  Nothing  will  prove  sufficient  except  an 
increasing  body  of  men  and  women  who  refuse  to 
content  themselves  with  the  accepted  standards, 
who  see  possibilities  which  the  multitude  have  not 
yet  seen,  who  dare  to  believe  in  them,  experiment 


ABOVE  THE  AVERAGE  133 

with  them,  work  for  them,  who  count  it  one  of  the 
tests  of  their  character  to  be  above  the  average  and 
ahead  of  the  time. 


IV 

St.  Martin  of  Tours,  so  runs  the  legend,  was  seated 
in  his  cell  when  a  knock  came  at  the  door  and  a 
lordly  presence  entered.  “Who  are  you?”  said  the 
saint,  and  the  figure  answered,  “I  am  the  Savior.” 
But  the  saint  was  suspicious,  as  saints  must  be  in 
this  wicked  world,  and  said:  “Where,  then,  are  the 
prints  of  the  nails?”  And  the  devil  vanished. 

This  much  truth  lies  on  the  surface  of  the  legend : 
saviorhood,  which  is  the  highest  form  of  character, 
is  always  so  associated  with  being  above  the  average 
that  it  never  yet  has  been  able  to  avoid  sacrifice. 
Even  to  live  above  the  average  of  organized  religion 
itself  is  costly.  For  organized  religion,  like  organized 
government  and  organized  business,  while  it  con¬ 
tinually  levels  up  our  worst,  also  levels  down  our 
best.  That  it  levels  up  our  worst  seems  clear.  Some 
folks  suspect  that  people  inside  the  churches  and 
people  outside  are  entirely  alike.  One  who  during 
the  war  spoke  before  all  sorts  of  audiences  about 
the  Allied  cause  and  associated  measures  of  relief, 
must  question  that.  An  audience  in  a  moving- 
picture  theater  represents  about  the  dead  level  of 


134  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

the  human  average  in  America.  If  one  notes  the 
appeals  that  catch  on  there,  the  arguments  that  con¬ 
vince,  the  illustrations  that  are  liked,  the  opinions 
that  are  applauded,  and  then  goes  to  a  church  to 
speak,  he  sees  the  difference.  The  church  has  un¬ 
questionably  leveled  up. 

But  it  also  levels  down.  Organized  religion  did 
to  death  the  prophets  of  Israel,  slew  Socrates,  helped 
to  put  the  cross  on  Calvary,  and  all  through  the 
centuries  has  fought  with  vehement  hatred  against 
its  own  pathfinders  and  seers.  Today,  as  always 
happens  when  a  supreme  ideal  endeavors  to  get 
itself  expressed  in  human  institutions,  the  general 
average  of  organized  religion  is  lower  than  the  best. 
A  great  deal  of  popular  religion  represented  in  the 
church  is  a  halfway  affair. 

Men  find  their  life  made  up  of  many  disparate 
and  unrelated  elements.  They  work  and  eat  and 
sleep;  they  play  golf  and  read  books  and  go  to  the 
theater;  they  travel  and  visit — and  just  as  they  pass 
from  one  of  these  to  another  with  no  thought  that 
one  should  control  all  the  rest,  so  sometimes  they 
add  one  more  element  and  go  to  church.  There  is  a 
sense  of  mystery  in  them  which  the  church  satis¬ 
fies,  an  esthetic  response  to  the  dignity  of  an  historic 
faith.  But  out  of  this  experience  also  they  pass 
with  no  more  idea  that  it  is  meant  to  control  all  life 
than  they  feel  when  they  pass  from  reading  books 


ABOVE  THE  AVERAGE  135 

— — — — — — — — — ■  ■■'■■■■  ■■  ■  —— — ■  — — — — —— — — — — ■» 

to  playing  tennis.  Religion  is  one  of  life’s  after¬ 
thoughts  ,  an  extra,  like  cuttings  from  which  dress¬ 
makers  make  fancy  additions  after  the  general  body 
of  the  cloth  has  been  used  for  warmth  and  protec¬ 
tion. 

Anyone,  therefore,  who  is  in  earnest  about  his 
religion  has  always  to  struggle  against  the  down- 
drag  of  this  halfway,  mediocre  kind  of  religion.  To 
a  man  in  earnest  God  can  never  be  a  halfway  mat¬ 
ter;  he  will  be  nothing  at  all  or  else  he  will  be 
the  regulative  center  of  life.  For  every  man  does 
have  a  regulative  center.  With  many  it  is  self- 
interest.  Friendships  are  formed  because  they  serve 
self-interest;  marriage  is  contracted  for  the  sake 
of  self-interest;  vocation  is  chosen,  not  for  service 
but  for  self-interest;  even  when  war  breaks  out  and 
millions  of  men  pour  out  their  blood  like  water  in 
sacrifice,  some  see  the  whole  situation  in  terms  of 
their  self-interest.  Such  folk  are  not  always  think¬ 
ing  of  themselves;  they  think  of  all  sorts  of  things 
as  other  people  do:  but  whenever  there  is  a  de¬ 
cision  to  be  made,  an  attitude  to  be  taken,  instinc¬ 
tively,  often  unconsciously,  the  whole  matter  is 
referred  to  the  arbitrament  of  self-interest. 

To  be  a  religious  man  in  earnest  means  that  the 
regulative  center  of  life  is  not  self-interest,  but  fel¬ 
lowship  with  the  Highest  and  a  sense  of  responsi¬ 
bility  to  him.  That  is  one  of  the  inner  meanings 


136 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


of  prayer.  A  fine  English  Christian  has  said  that 
his  prayer  more  and  more  reduces  itself  to  two 
words — “Now,  Lord.”  He  means  that  in  the  pres¬ 
sure  of  the  day’s  work  he  can  make  swift  reference 
to  the  supreme  court  of  his  life. 

That  kind  of  experience  is  too  familiar  to  be  called 
unreal.  A  young  man  falls  4n  love  with  a  high- 
minded  girl;  marries  her;  the  children  come;  the 
home  becomes  the  center  of  his  life.  He  does  not 
think  of  it  all  the  time,  but  it  is  always  there. 
Nothing  in  his  life  escapes  its  influence;  it  per¬ 
meates  his  plans  ;  it  is  the  nucleus  of  his  ambitions 
and  hopes;  and,  as  for  his  character,  it  is  the 
strongest  protection  that  he  has,  so  powerful  and 
controlling  are  the  influences  that  flow  from  it 
against  all  that  is  shameful  and  unclean.  So  cen¬ 
tral  and  controlling  also  is  a  genuine,  first-rate,  re¬ 
ligious  fellowship  with  God — what  a  sextant  is  to 
the  sailor,  the  keynote  to  the  singer,  the  color  tone 
to  the  painter,  sun  time  to  our  uncertain  watches. 
But  a  man  who  is  to  possess  that  experience  must 
make  it  one  of  the  first  items  in  his  determination 
that  he  will  not  think  down  and  will  not  live  down 
to  the  general  average  of  organized  religion. 

Indeed,  when  such  vital  religion  meets  formal¬ 
ism  and  obscurantism  in  the  church,  the  cost  is 
sometimes  heavy.  The  peril  most  to  be  feared 
about  the  ministry  in  this  generation  lies  here. 


ABOVE  THE  AVERAGE 


137 


Our  innermost  temptation  is  to  reduce  ourselves  to 
some  denomination’s  lowest  common  denomina¬ 
tor,  to  sink  to  the  ecclesiastical  average,  to  help  to 
put  down  the  worst  in  men,  but  at  the  same  time 
to  miss  the  best,  lacking  vision  to  see  what  the  Most 
High  would  reveal  to  us,  and  then  lacking  courage 
to  say  what  we  see,  until,  like  other  ministers  of 
organized  religion  in  history,  we  help  to  put  three 
crosses  on  Calvaty.  The  hope  of  the  church  lies 
in  leadership  above  the  average  and  ahead  of  the 
time. 

One  cannot  think  long  about  such  courageous 
nonconformity  without  remembering  Jesus.  In  our 
imaginations  of  him  we  have  smoothed  him  out, 
tamed  him  down,  conveniently  forgotten  what  man¬ 
ner  of  man  he  really  was,  until  his  tremendous 
figure  has  grown  pallid,  pacific,  and  undisturbing. 
We  are  always  doing  that  with  the  great  figures  of 
the  past.  We  have  mental  stencils  of  respectability, 
and  we  paint  over  the  great  personalities  of  the  race, 
leaving  nothing  visible  save  our  conventionalities. 

Renan  described  Jesus  as  a  “lovely  character” 
with  a  “transporting  countenance.”  Apparently  no 
one  who  actually  knew  Jesus  would  have  thought 
such  terms  adequate — certainly  not  the  Pharisees 
facing  his  fearless  indignation  or  the  moneychang¬ 
ers  fleeing  alike  his  scourge  and  his  stinging  words. 
One  finds  it  difficult  to  imagine  the  mob  in  Pilate’s 


138  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

court'  crying  “Crucify  him!”  that  they  might  be 
rid  of  a  lovely  character  with  a  transporting  coun¬ 
tenance.  Rather  they  were  trying  to  get  rid  of  the 
leading  nonconformist  of  his  day,  who  had  said 
that  he  would  not  put  his  new  wine  into  their  old 
wine-skins  nor  sew  his  Gospel  as  a  new  patch  on 
their  old  garments.  Whatever  else  one  may  find 
in  the  Master,  one  surely  cannot  miss  his  cour¬ 
ageous  nonconformity. 

This  does  not  mean  that  anyone  who  follows  him 
should  join  the  first  minority  he  sees  and  become 
a  nonconformist  for  the  sake  of  being  one.  Minor¬ 
ities  are  not  right  just  because  they  are  minorities. 
Some  minorities  are  intolerable  nuisances.  Joining 
a  minority  and  becoming  a  nonconformist  requires 
spiritual  discrimination.  If  a  man  lacks  it  he  would 
better  join  the  majority;  he  is  far  safer  there. 
Joining  the  minority  is  like  being  married.  It  is  not 
to  be  entered  into  “unadvisedly  or  lightly;  but 
reverently,  discreetly,  advisedly,  soberly,  and  in 
the  fear  of  God.” 

This,  however,  is  also  true,  that  no  man  need 
ever  expect  to  remind  the  world  of  the  Master 
unless  he  is  prepared  courageously  to  live  above 
the  average  and  ahead  of  the  time. 


ABOVE  THE  AVERAGE  139 


V 

It  is  not,  however,  in  these  organized  forms  of  the 
general  average  of  which  we  have  been  speaking — 
government,  business,  and  church — that  this  test 
presses  most  intimately  on  some  of  us.  The  imme¬ 
diate  social  group  in  the  midst  of  which  our  daily 
life  is  carried  on  also  has  its  average,  and,  while  we 
may  not  have  evolved  from  chameleons,  a  strong 
family  likeness  is  suggested  by  our  most  almost  un¬ 
canny  tendency  to  adapt  our  color  to  our  back¬ 
ground. 

The  hardest  task  assigned  to  anyone  on  earth  is 
living  above  the  average  of  his  own  home.  Some¬ 
times  that  is  necessary.  Some  family  groups  are 
like  canal  boats  that  have  to  be  pulled  if  they  are 
to  get  anywhere.  Left  alone  they  stand  still ;  there 
is  no  inward,  spiritual  driving  power;  they  have 
to  be  hauled,  and  it  is  weary  work  hauling  them. 

The  difficulty  involved  here  lies  in  the  fact  that  in 
all  our  more  intimate  relationships  with  family  and 
friends  we  feel  tremendously  the  pressure  of  the 
herd  instinct.  Psychoanalysts  tell  us  that  together 
with  the  preservation  of  life  and  the  attraction  of 
sex  this  instinct  to  follow  with  the  herd  is  the  most 
powerful  force  in  our  subconscious  life.  Certainly 
we  know  without  the  help  of  psychoanalysis  that 
it  is  immensely  powerful. 


140  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

When  we  care  for  any  group  of  people,  as  we  do 
for  our  family  and  friends,  we  have  put  into  their 
hands  an  almost  irresistible  influence  over  us.  We 
respond  with  telepathic  swiftness  to  their  words 
and  emotions.  What  happens  to  them  happens  to 
us;  what  they  think  and  feel  we  contagiously  re¬ 
ceive;  when  their  opinions  and  practices  are  con¬ 
cerned,  we  are  infinitely  sensitive  and  impression¬ 
able.  Because,  above  all  else,  we  instinctively  wish 
to  please  them,  the  most  stinging  cut  we  can  re¬ 
ceive  is  their  disapproval.  The  criticism  of  a 
stranger  is  easily  borne,  but  not  the  censure  of  a 
friend.  When,  therefore,  conflict  comes  between 
our  best  conscience  and  the  general  average  of  our 
inner  social  group,  we  face  the  need  for  courage  in 
its  acutest  form.  We  know  then  that  to  possess 
the  strength  of  will  to  live  above  the  average  is  one 
of  the  primary  and  most  searching  tests  of  character. 

\ 

VI 

This  sort  of  courage  in  all  the  applications  we 
have  made  of  it  is  represented  on  Calvary.  The 
organized  government  of  Jesus’  day,  the  organized 
business  life  which  he  disturbed  when  he  cleared  the 
temple  of  the  moneychangers,  the  organized  re¬ 
ligion,  and  the  general  level  of  his  family  and  friends 
all  represented  an  average  with  which  he  refused 


ABOVE  THE  AVERAGE  141 

to  be  content.  Diseipleship  to  him  never  can  be 
adequately  understood  without  involving  his  insis¬ 
tence  on  superior  standards  and  on  superior  courage. 
We  sing  about  the  cross  today, 

i 

In  the  cross  of  Christ  I  glory , 

Towering  o’er  the  wrecks  of  time. 

When,  however,  Jesus  first  bore  the  cross,  no  one 
had  ever  thought  of  singing  about  it.  When  first 
they  put  the  cross  upon  his  back  and  he  stumbled 
down  the  narrow,  ill-smelling  lanes  of  Jerusalem 
amid  the  gaping,  mocking  crowds  out  toward 
Golgotha,  to  have  sung  about  the  cross  would  have 
been  unheard-of  madness.  Cicero  uses  three  words 
about  it  in  which,  even  if  one  does  not  under¬ 
stand  the  Latin,  he  can  feel  the  weight  of  agony: 
“ crudelissimum  deterrimumque  supplicium” — “the 
most  cruel  and  terrific  punishment.”  That  was  the 
cross  when  Jesus  bore  it. 

Moreover,  we  never  have  seen  crucifixion ;  with  us 
it  is  an  imagined  agony;  but  Jesus  had  often  seen  it. 
Again  and  again  by  the  roadsides  he  had  seen  crosses 
and  their  victims,  the  long-drawn-out  and  pitiless 
agony  that  crucifixion  involved.  That  last  evening, 
therefore,  when  Judas  stole  away  to  betray  him, 
that  night  when  under  the  olive  trees  he  wrestled 
with  his  own  soul,  that  morning  in  Pilate’s  court 
when  he  heard  the  crowd  cry  “Crucify  him!”  he 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


142 


knew  what  it  meant  down  to  its  last  unutterable 
detail.  Yet,  rather  than  live  down  to  the  average 
and  not  up  toward  God,  he  went  through  with  it. 

In  a  day  when  there  is  no  hope  for  our  civiliza¬ 
tion  except  in  superior  character,  Christians  should 
recall  that  the  cross  of  which  they  sing  means  some¬ 
thing  besides  singing — sheer  courage  to  live  above 
the  average  and  ahead  of  the  time. 


Harnessing  the  Caveman 


I 

ANY  people  listen,  perhaps  allured  but 
still  unconvinced,  to  the  presentation 
of  high  ideals  of  spiritual  quality  and 
life,  and  the  reason  is  the  caveman. 
Young  people  in  particular  often  visualize  their 
moral  problem  in  some  such  way  as  this:  on  the 
one  side  is  the  ideal  life  with  its  purity,  its  self- 
forgetfulness,  its  fine  awareness  of  things  invisible, 
and  on  the  other  side  are  the  primitive  instincts — 
pugnacity,  egotism,  sensuality,  the  caveman  within, 
and  between  these  two  there  is  an  irreconcilable 
hostility.  Thus  morally  split  and  bifurcated,  with 
the  ancient  savage  frowning  on  the  potential  saint, 
folk  try  to  live,  supposing  that  such  is  man’s  inevi¬ 
table  estate. 

Some,  to  be  sure,  endeavor  to  simplify  their  dis¬ 
united  lives  by  throwing  their  whole  weight  upon 
one  side  of  the  division  against  the  other,  but  sel¬ 
dom  with  entire  success.  They  try  to  be  whole- 

143 


144  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

hearted  cavemen,  to  give  loose  rein  to  their  primi¬ 
tive  instincts,  but  even  if  they  do  not  encounter 
the  laws  of  man  they  face  that  higher  half  of  them¬ 
selves,  their  Dr.  Jekyll  who  regards  their  Mr.  Hyde 
with  ashamed  contempt.  Or  if  they  side  with  their 
higher  half,  they  often  see  nothing  better  to  do 
with  their  primitive  instincts  than  to  restrain  them, 
thrust  them  down  into  their  hold  and  shut  the  hatch 
on  them.  Such  folk  always  have  a  smoldering 
mutiny  on  board.  Even  on  days  of  quiet  sailing 
they  can  hear  the  grumbling  of  their  barbarian 
instincts  in  the  hold,  and  sometimes  those  long  re¬ 
pressed  mutineers  break  loose  and  seize  the  quarter¬ 
deck  and  there  is  trouble  to  pay  before  they  are 
got  back  again. 

Most  folk  are  in  one  of  these  two  classes:  bar¬ 
barians  with  penitent  and  wistful  interludes,  or 
good  men  with  unconquered  mutinies. 

Yet  both  are  failing  to  meet  one  of  the  elemental 
tests  of  character:  harnessing  the  caveman.  For 
our  primitive  instincts  are  neither  to  be  surren¬ 
dered  to  nor  to  be  stamped  on  and  cast  out.  They 
are  about  the  most  valuable  part  of  our  native 
equipment.  They  are  our  original  motive  force, 
and  our  business  with  them  is  not  to  crush  them 
but  to  expand  their  uses,  to  organize  them  around 
new  purposes  and  direct  them  to  new  aims.  In  the 
jungle,  for  example,  the  hunting  instinct  inevitably 


HARNESSING  THE  CAVEMAN  145 

developed.  Hunger  evoked  it.  Men  had  to  hunt 
if  they  would  live  and,  because  nature  associates 
satisfaction  with  her  necessary  operations,  men 
enjoyed  the  hunting  to  which  need  prompted  them. 
Now,  however,  when  jungle  days  are  long  out¬ 
grown  and  hunting  in  its  old  form  is  no  longer 
necessary,  the  hunting  instinct  does  not  stop,  but  is 
lifted  up,  enlarged,  centered  around  new  purposes; 
it  becomes  driving  power  in  some  of  the  noblest 
achievements  of  the  race.  When  Magellan  circum¬ 
navigated  the  earth,  he  was  hunting  for  the  truth 
about  the  globe.  When  Galileo  swept  the  heavens 
with  his  telescope,  he  was  hunting  for  a  larger  vision 
of  the  universe.  When  Pasteur,  in  spite  of  his  pa¬ 
ralysis,  sought  for  the  secret  of  disease,  he  was 
hunting  a  remedy  for  human  ills.  When  St. 
Augustine  prayed,  “I  will  seek  Thee,  that  my  soul 
may  live,”  he  was  hunting  for  spiritual  resources 
without  which  life  is  not  worth  living.  To  what 
fine  meanings  and  noble  aims  can  this  primitive 
hunting  instinct  be  expanded! 

The  difference  between  the  best  lives  and  the 
worst  does  not  lie  in  the  possession  of  strong 
primitive  instincts  by  the  low  and  the  lack  of  them 
by  the  high.  The  difference  lies  in  the  purposes 
around  which  those  primitive  instincts  are  organ¬ 
ized  and  the  ends  to  which  they  are  directed.  A 
dog’s  loyalty  to  his  master  is  so  fair  a  thing  that 


146  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

unforgetable  stories  are  told  about  its  depth  and 
constancy.  Yet  a  dog’s  loyalty  to  his  master  began 
with  a  wolfs  loyalty  to  his  pack.  That  was  its 
starting  point.  For  primitive  instincts  can  be  trans¬ 
formed,  and  that  fact  presents  to  human  character 
one  of  its  elemental  problems  and  one  of  its  finest 
hopes. 

ii 

Ambition,  the  desire  to  overtop  our  fellows,  to 
have  more  than  other  people  have,  to  be  more  than 
other  people  are,  has  left  a  bloodstained  trail  across 
history.  It  began  back  in  the  jungle  where  men 
had  to  conquer  or  die.  Either  this  chief  would  over¬ 
throw  that  chief  and  seize  his  wives  and  his  estate, 
or  else  that  chief  would  overthrow  this  chief  and 
seize  his.  Under  such  circumstances,  when  a  man 
was  born  with  a  powerful  endowment  of  physical 
and  mental  force,  there  was  but  one  channel  in 
which  that  overflowing  stream  of  personal  energy 
could  flow — ambition  to  surpass  and  overcome. 

When  this  primitive  instinct,  ingrained  by  imme¬ 
morial  necessary,  passed  from  the  jungle  into 
history,  the  consequences  were  terrific.  Pierre 
Fritel’s  picture,  “The  Conquerors,”  tells  the  story. 
Between  two  rows  of  the  piled  dead,  men  stark  and 
naked,  women  with  cold  babies  at  their  breasts, 
amid  the  bleak  desolation  of  old  battlefields,  the 


HARNESSING  THE  CAVEMAN  147 

conquerors  appear,  Alexander,  Caesar,  Napoleon, 
and  their  ambitious  company,  riding  on  horseback 
amid  bloody  scenes  to  their  supremacy. 

Nevertheless,  in  spite  of  the  ruinous  meanings 
of  ambition,  none  of  us  who  amounts  to  anything 
lacks  it.  That  instinct  is  an  indispensable  part  of 
our  native  endowment  ;  it  is  one  of  the  most  pow¬ 
erful  driving  forces  of  our  lives.  Let  the  ambition 
to  discover  the  North  Pole  lay  hold  on  Peary  and 
no  obstacles  could  defeat  him.  For  over  twenty  years 
he  made  it  his  ambition  to  plant  the  Stars  and 
Stripes  at  the  North  Pole,  until,  as  he  said,  “I  long 
ago  ceased  to  think  of  myself  save  as  an  instrument 
for  the  attainment  of  that  end.”  If  a  child  were 
born  in  one  of  our  homes  lacking  ambition,  we 
should  be  seriously  worried:  he  would  not  be  all 
there.  Whatever  we  may  be  doing  with  that  in¬ 
stinct,  it  is  in  us  all  and  more  than  once,  when  it 
has  cracked  its  whip,  we  have  done  some  of  our 
best  work. 

The  attitude  of  idealistic  teachers  toward  this 
deep-seated  and  powerful  element  in  our  nature  has 
often  been  one  of  severe  repression.  They  have 
condemned  it  utterly  as  a  curse,  to  be  cast  out  and 
trodden  under  foot.  Such  an  attitude  is  histori¬ 
cally  represented  in  old  monasteries  where  men 
turned  their  backs  on  this  world’s  ambitions  and 
hopes,  and  counted  themselves  holy  for  so  doing.. 


148  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

That  same  attitude  is  represented  in  some  forms 
of  evangelicalism,  as  in  hymns  like, 

Oh,  to  be  nothing ,  nothing. 

The  idea  behind  that  familiar  conception  of 
Christianity  is  that  ambition  is  to  be  crushed,  and 
the  consequence  of  that  attitude  has  been  a  pallid 
and  sickly  kind  of  Christianity.  If  a  man  prays 
too  hard,  “Oh,  to  be  nothing,  nothing,”  he  may  get 
exactly  what  he  asks. 

When,  however,  one  turns  to  those  great  lives 
which  have  been  the  glory  of  the  Christian  move¬ 
ment,  it  is  plain  that  they  are  handling  ambition 
in  another  way  altogether.  William  Booth,  founder 
of  the  Salvation  Army,  was  a  man  whose  figure  looms 
the  larger  the  longer  we  know  it,  as  mountains  look 
greater  when  we  retreat  from  them.  But  his  own 
phrasing  of  the  motive  power  which  drove  him 
down  into  the  slums  of  Darkest  England  to  work 
for  folk  whom  everybody  else  had  forgotten,  was 
this:  “the  impulses  and  urgings  of  an  undying  am¬ 
bition”  to  save  souls.  Ambition  is  not  something  to 
be  cast  out ;  it  is  to  be  lifted  and  expanded,  oriented 
around  new  aims,  and  devoted  to  great  purposes. 

The  greatest  saints  are  always  made  of  the  same 
material  as  the  greatest  sinners.  Ignatius  Loyola, 
the  dashing,  gallant,  adventurous  cavalier,  becomes 
Ignatius  Loyola,  the  fearless,  ambitious,  militant 


HARNESSING  THE  CAVEMAN  149 


reformer,  with  all  the  endowments  of  his  old  life 
reorganized  around  Christian  purposes  in  the  new. 
He  threw  none  of  his  equipment  away.  He  kept  it 
all  and  used  it. 

For  we  can  employ  powers  like  ambition  in  many 
different  ways.  A  man  may  be  ambitious  to  conquer 
a  neighboring  chief  and  steal  his  wives,  or  he  may 
be  ambitious  to  make  a  city  neighborhood  through 
his  settlement  house  a  more  decent  place  in  which 
to  live.  A  man  may  be  ambitious  to  be  the  richest 
man  in  the  county,  or  he  may  be  ambitious  to  make 
his  business  a  blessing  to  every  man  who  works  for 
him  and  a  public  service  to  every  customer  who 
buys  from  him.  A  man  may  be  ambitious  to  be 
saluted  as  Rabbi  in  the  market-place,  or  he  may 
be  ambitious  to  lay  his  life,  like  the  prophet’s,  on 
the  lives  of  those  whom  he  teaches  and  breathe  into 
them  the  breath  of  life. 

When  Mackay,  the  missionary,  reached  Uganda 
in  Africa,  the  difference  between  him  and  the 
natives  was  not  that  he  lacked  ambition  and  they 
had  it.  He  had  more  ambition  than  all  of  them 
put  together  or  else  he  would  not  have  been  there — 
ambition  to  make  Uganda  one  more  province  in  the 
Kingdom  of  Christ.  These  primitive  instincts  are 
too  valuable  to  throw  away.  They  are  meant  to  be 
developed,  reorganized  and  rededicated,  and  the 
degree  to  which  that  has  been  achieved  is  one  of 


150  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


the  primary  tests  of  character.  The  ideal  man,  as 
Jacob  Boehme  said,  has  all  his  fiery  energies  har¬ 
nessed  to  the  service  of  the  light. 

hi 

This  truth  applies  to  combativeness.  The  centu¬ 
ries  are  sick  with  it,  and  its  trail  across  our  genera¬ 
tion's  life  has  made  for  us  the  bloodiest  days  in 
human  history.  It  began  in  the  jungle  where  men 
had  to  fight  wild  beasts  or  die,  where  they  could 
not  have  survived  had  not  nature  endowed  them 
with  capacity  for  the  swift  rise  of  pugnacity.  We 
still  have  in  our  bodies  the  left-overs  of  that  old 
necessity.  When  we  are  tired  one  of  the  surest 
symptoms  of  our  fatigue  is  that  we  begin  imagin¬ 
ing  controversies  with  other  people,  making  up  in 
our  minds  contentious  conversations  with  folk  whom 
we  do  not  like,  writing  imaginary  letters  swelling 
with  rage  or  bitter  with  sarcasm.  The  reason  lies 
deep  in  our  history.  Our  fatigued  bodies  crave 
stimulant  and,  if  there  is  no  real  fight  on,  our  bodies 
persuade  our  minds  to  imagine  one  so  that  the 
glands  may  discharge  the  old  fluid  which  used  so 
swiftly  to  prepare  our  fathers  for  a  fight.  So  deep- 
seated  in  us  is  the  instinct  of  pugnacity ! 

When  one  thinks  of  this  combative  spirit  in  rela¬ 
tion  with  the  Christian  Gospel,  in  what  sharp  con- 


HARNESSING  THE  CAVEMAN  151 

trast  do  the  two  things  stand!  One’s  first  impres¬ 
sion  is  that  Christianity  can  have  nothing  to  do 
with  combativeness  except  to  cast  it  out.  It  is  ruin¬ 
ous,  disruptive,  wrong.  It  has  plunged  the  world 
in  blood.  Yet  one  cannot  help  remembering  that 
when  Martin  Luther  walked  into  the  imperial 
council  hall  of  Charles  V  at  Worms  to  meet  his 
enemies,  a  famous  general  tapped  him  on  the 
shoulder  and  said,  “My  poor  monk !  my  poor  monk ! 
thou  art  marching  to  make  a  stand,  the  like  of 
which  I,  and  many  a  general,  in  our  gravest  battles 
have  never  made.”  Combativeness  has  meaning  in 
realms  where  physical  violence  has  been  left  far  be¬ 
hind.  “When  I  am  angry,”  said  Luther,  “I  can 
pray  well  and  preach  well.”  He  did  not  cast  his 
caveman  out;  he  made  his  caveman  work  for  him. 

Pugnacity  expressing  itself  in  physical  violence 
is  sheer  savagery  and  in  its  organized  form  in  war 
it  is  the  most  threatening  peril  that  the  world  faces. 
Civilization  cannot  abide  its  continuance.  But 
pugnacity  has  other  expressions  besides  that.  Com¬ 
bativeness  may  be  in  a  soldier  driving  his  bayonet 
into  the  abdomen  of  an  enemy  or  it  may  be  in  a 
group  of  scientists  like  those  who  are  now  stalking 
yellow  fever  in  the  five  places  on  this  planet  where 
it  breeds,  determined  to  win  a  great  fight  for 
humanity.  Combativeness  may  appear  in  a  gun¬ 
man,  swaggering,  contentious  and  violent,  or  in  an 


152  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

educator  who  has  declared  war  on  the  ignorance  of 
a  Chinese  province,  and  against  all  obstacles  is 
building  schools  with  which  to  win  his  fight.  Com¬ 
bativeness  may  shoot  up  a  frontier  train  in  a 
drunken  brawl  or  it  may  go  into  the  pulpit  to  at¬ 
tack  a  social  evil  like  slavery,  saying  in  Henry 
Ward  Beecher’s  words,  “All  the  bells  that  God  has 
put  in  my  belfry  shall  ring!” 

Indeed,  the  only  way  to  get  rid  of  one  kind  of  pug¬ 
nacity  is  to  exalt  the  other.  As  Hinton  said,  the 
only  way  to  abolish  war  is  to  make  peace  heroic. 

iv 

Indeed,  it  is  a  strange  mistake  to  suppose  that 
these  primitive  endowments  of  man’s  nature,  obvi¬ 
ously  needed  in  war,  are  not  just  as  indispensable  in 
peace.  Those  of  us  who  were  with  the  armies  in 
France  saw  magnificent  exhibitions  of  courage.  Yet 
some  of  those  soldiers  today,  carrying  on  in  civil 
life  with  broken  health,  shattered  nerves,  lost  limbs, 
need  more  courage  than  it  took  to  see  them  through 
at  St.  Mihiel.  Indeed,  even  if  they  escaped  the  bul¬ 
lets  and  the  gas  and  came  out  whole  and  now  are 
facing  in  their  personal  and  family  life  only  the  sort 
of  experiences  that  soon  or  late  fall  on  most  of  us,  the 
loss  of  children,  the  desperate  illness  of  those  whom 
we  love  better  than  ourselves,  the  collapse  of  for- 


HARNESSING  THE  CAVEMAN  153 

tune  that  forces  a  man  to  go  down  to  the  bottom 
and  start  over  again,  one  suspects  that  more  sheer 
courage  is  demanded  than  the  Argonne  required. 

We  are  wrong  when  we  suppose  that  courage  re¬ 
ceives  its  supreme  exhibition  in  war.  More  patient 
courage  is  represented  in  the  “hundred  neediest 
cases”  of  The  New  York  Times  than  in  most  battles. 
Many  elements  in  war  help  people  to  be  courageous 
— the  mass  movements,  the  pride  of  patriotism,  the 
panoply  of  uniform  and  parade,  the  long  exalted 
traditions  of  war’s  glory;  all  these  help  to  create 
and  sustain  courage.  Moreover,  war  is  popular 
while  it  is  being  waged;  orators  defend  it,  songs 
praise  it,  the  whole  nation  is  shouting  for  it;  and 
the  most  unimportant  doughboy  in  the  trenches 
knows  that  news  of  the  enterprise  in  which  he 
shares  is  awaited  by  millions  with  excited  interest. 
Then,  too,  there  is  companionship  in  war;  sacri¬ 
fice  and  suffering  are  gregarious,  not  solitary,  and 
no  man  goes  into  a  tight  place  without  knowing  that 
all  around  him  are  thousands  daring  the  same. 

But  in  ordinary  life  multitudes  face  situations 
where  courage  is  desperately  needed,  where  no 
pomp  of  circumstance  sustains  their  bravery,  no 
interested  public  is  concerned  to  see  them  win,  and 
no  fellowship  surrounds  their  solitary  fortitude. 
Blind  folk  fighting  a  brave  battle,  sick  folk  nourish¬ 
ing  a  forlorn  yet  patient  hope,  poor  folk  sustaining 


154  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


crushing  poverty,  bereaved  folk  covering  broken 
hearts  with  the  beautiful  hypocrisy  of  smiling  faces 
— who  says  that  the  spirit  of  combative  courage  is 
not  needed?  If  ever  a  man  is  tempted,  in  a  low 
mood,  to  give  up  hope  about  humanity,  let  him 
think  upon  the  courage  which  human  life  on  every 
side  of  him  exhibits — the  quiet,  constant,  sustained 
heroic  courage  in  obscure  and  forgotten  places 
where  nobody  sees! 

No  great  moral  life  is  possible  without  this  spirit 
which  enabled  Paul  to  say,  “I  have  fought  the  good 
fight.”  A  young  man  in  one  of  our  colleges  once 
sought  an  interview  with  Dr.  Robert  E.  Speer.  The 
youth  came  in  shamefacedly,  looked  around  to  be 
sure  that  no  one  could  hear  or  see,  and  handed  Dr. 
Speer  a  letter.  Seeing  that  it  was  in  a  girl’s  hand¬ 
writing,  Dr.  Speer  returned  it,  but  the  youth  in¬ 
sisted  that  he  read  it  through.  It  ran  like  this: 

“I  know  all  about  your  life  at -  College,  and  I 

want  to  tell  you  what  I  think  about  you.  You 
and  I  have  known  one  another  all  our  lives,  and  we 
have  been  good  friends;  but  I  think  you  are  a 
coward  and  I  think  that  I  ought  to  tell  you  so.” 
When  Dr.  Speer  looked  up  the  boy’s  lips  were 
trembling.  “That  is  not  the  worst,”  he  said.  “She 
tells  the  truth.”  President  of  his  class,  playing  on 
the  football  eleven,  he  was  going  to  pieces  because 
he  was  a  coward.  He  knew  what  was  right  but  he 


HARNESSING  THE  CAVEMAN  155 

lacked  courage  to  stand  by  it.  As  Samuel  Johnson 
said,  “Unless  a  man  has  that  virtue  he  has  no  secur¬ 
ity  for  preserving  any  other.” 

“Sinner”  is  an  old  word  and  for  some  people  the 
teeth  are  gone  from  it.  But  there  is  another  word 
which  one  craves  the  chance  to  use  about  certain 
folk  who  are  welching  in  the  moral  fight.  They  are 
cowards.  They  came  from  fine  families,  they  have 
fine  traditions,  they  know  their  duty,  their  sense 
of  honor  has  not  lost  its  voice.  But  they  are 
cowards. 

The  ideal  life  is  not  soft.  It  has  harnessed  the 
caveman  and  put  him  to  use.  It  has  belted  ambition 
and  combative  courage  into  the  achievement  of 
stable  and  useful  character.  It  has  caught  the 
meaning  of  Walt  Whitman's  brusque  lines: 

You  there ,  impotent ,  loose  in  the  knees, 

Open  your  scarf  d  chops  till  I  blow  grit  within  you. 

v 

One  of  the  faults  in  much  popular  religion 
springs  from  the  endeavor  to  construct  the  religious 
life  out  of  our  negative  and  passive  virtues  and  to 
neglect  the  mastery  and  use  of  our  vigorous  native 
endowments.  As  a  result,  we  get  a  religion  charac¬ 
terized  by  dullness,  apathy,  feebleness. 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


156 

My  friend,  who  considers  himself  interestingly 
irreligious,  was  once  assailing  religion  with  consid¬ 
erable  dash  and  spirit.  In  effect  he  was  saying  that 
faith  is  an  opiate,  that  men  drug  themselves  with 
it,  become  sleepy,  complacent  and  comfortable 
through  the  use  of  it,  and  that  their  main  object  in 
going  to  church  is  to  be  sprayed  once  more  with 
spiritual  cocaine  so  that  they  may  feel  less  acutely 
the  ills  of  life  and  the  miseries  of  men.  As  he  thus 
talked  on,  my  mind  rehearsed  the  life  stories  of 
some  of  these  religious  folk  whom  he  wTas  thus  be¬ 
rating,  whose  faith  had  been  to  them  so  comfort¬ 
able  and  benumbing  an  anesthetic.  I  thought  of 
Hugh  Latimer  on  his  way  to  the  stake  to  be  burned 
for  his  faith,  saying  to  his  companion  in  martyr¬ 
dom,  “Be  of  good  comfort,  Master  Ridley,  and  play 
the  man.  We  shall  this  day  light  such  a  candle, 
by  God’s  grace,  in  England,  as  I  trust  shall  never 
be  put  out.”  Raymond  Lull,  sustaining  with  in¬ 
credible  resolution  his  labors  among  the  Mohamme¬ 
dans,  and  his  ultimate  martyrdom;  Adoniram  Jud- 
son,  the  missionary,  lying  for  seventeen  months  in 
the  King  of  Ava’s  prisons  and  emerging  just  as  un¬ 
beaten  and  twice  as  determined  as  he  was  before; 
John  Howard,  the  prison  reformer,  who  made  as 
adventurous  an  expedition  into  the  dark  continent 
of  Europe’s  prisons  as  ever  Livingstone  did  into 
Africa, — such  lives  came  into  memory  and  others 


HARNESSING  THE  CAVEMAN  157 


whose  biographies  never  will  be  written  but  whom 
some  of  us  know  well.  Most  of  all  I  thought  of  the 
supreme  Figure  in  the  history  of  religion  and  of 
the  way  his  fearless  life  moved  with  persistent  pur¬ 
pose  through  calumny,  hatred  and  frustration  to  the 
brutality  of  the  cross.  And  when  my  friend  had 
finished  disclosing  his  theory  of  religion  as  an  anes¬ 
thetic,  I  said  some  things  to  him  in  straight  Anglo- 
Saxon. 

Certainly  the  great  exemplars  of  religion  have 
never  acted  as  though  they  were  under  the  influ¬ 
ence  of  an  opiate. 

So  far  as  popular  religion  is  concerned,  however, 
my  friend  has  something  on  his  side.  How  much  of 
our  commonplace  religious  life  is  pulseless,  unad¬ 
venturous,  and  timid!  In  the  country  on  a  sum¬ 
mer  Sunday,  when  the  quiet  of  the  week’s  first  day 
falls  over  farm  and  woodland,  and  the  church  bells 
peal  their  charming,  lazy  call  to  worship,  how  rest¬ 
ful  is  the  scene!  And  if  one  asks  the  explanation 
of  this  unearthly  quiet  which  has  fallen  on  man’s 
work,  the  answer  is  “Religion.”  Even  in  great 
cities,  where  the  machinery  of  life  does  not  stop  and 
throngs  never  pause,  the  church  means  to  many 
people  chiefly  a  place  of  relaxation  from  the  strain 
of  life.  As  in  a  crowded  drawing-room,  amid  the 
clamor  of  eager  conversation,  a  call  of  “Hush!”  is 
heard  and,  slowly  growing  quieter,  the  crowd  hears 


158  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


a  voice  singing  and  is  silent,  so  religion  still  comes 
to  many  lives  amid  the  week’s  overstrain  and  tur-  - 
bulence,  and  its  chief  significance  is  passivity  and 
quiet. 

No  one  who  rightly  estimates  the  need  of  men 
for  inward  serenity  will  belittle  this  aspect  of  re¬ 
ligion’s  meaning.  But  there  surely  is  a  contrast 
sharp  and  unmistakable  between  this  idea  of  re¬ 
ligion  and  some  of  the  characteristic  attitudes  of 
Jesus.  When  he  cried,  “If  any  man  would  come 
after  me,  let  him  deny  himself,  and  take  up  his  cross 
daily,  and  follow  me,”  he  clearly  was  not  admin¬ 
istering  an  opiate.  He  was  calling  a  band  of  young 
men  to  an  adventure — one  of  the  most  costly  and 
significant  that  ever  captured  the  imagination  and 
allegiance  of  men.  Pizarro,  the  Peruvian  explorer, 
once  faced  his  soldiers  on  a  day  when  their  enter¬ 
prise  had  run  into  perilous  hazard.  With  his  sword’s 
point  he  drew  a  line  on  the  sand  from  east  to  west 
and,  turning  to  the  south,  he  said  to  his  followers, 
“Friends  and  comrades!  on  that  side  are  toil,  hunger, 
nakedness,  the  drenching  storm,  desertion,  and 
death;  on  this  side,  ease  and  pleasure.  There  lies 
Peru  with  its  riches;  here,  Panama  and  its  poverty. 
Choose,  each  man,  what  best  becomes  a  brave 
Castilian.  For  my  part  I  go  to  the  south.”  That 
sounds  extraordinarily  like  the  appeal  of  Jesus.  On 
a  sleepy  Sunday  morning,  with  a  listless  service  and 


HARNESSING  THE  CAVEMAN  159 

an  apathetic  sermon,  one  too  easily  may  forget  that 
the  driving  power  of  Christianity  has  lain  in 
the  courageous  and  combative  Personality  who 
founded  it,  the  adventurous  faith  which  has  sus¬ 
tained  it,  and  the  brave  people  who  have  been  its 
glory. 


vi 

To  be  sure,  the  transformation  of  primitive  in¬ 
stincts  is  at  times  exceedingly  difficult.  The  sexual 
instinct,  not  finding  normal  and  legitimate  expres¬ 
sion,  can  be  translated  into  artistic  and  social 
creativeness,  but  it  is  not  easy.  The  instinct  of 
fear,  indispensable  in  jungle  life  if  man  was  to 
escape  his  enemies,  has  to  be  elevated  into  respect 
for  equals  and  reverence  for  superiors.  Selfishness 
must  be  transformed  by  enlarging  the  idea  of  what 
the  self  is,  expanding  the  personality  until  it  takes 
in  our  friends,  our  community,  our  nation,  our 
world,  so  that  one  does  not  need  to  stamp  upon  his 
self,  but  can  say, 

To  thine  own  self  be  true, 

And  it  must  follow,  as  the  night  the  day, 

Thou  canst  not  then  be  false  to  any  man. 

Needless  to  say,  this  transformation  is  not  easy. 

Moreover,  not  only  is  the  problem  in  itself  diffi¬ 
cult,  it  is  needlessly  and  cruelly  complicated  by  un- 


160  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

toward  social  conditions  which  make  almost  impos¬ 
sible  the  reorganization  of  old  instincts  around  high 
purposes.  There  are  some  lives  that  never  will  have 
a  fair  chance  to  achieve  this  goal  until  their  social 
circumstances  can  be  changed.  A  gunman,  for  ex¬ 
ample,  has  been  called  “the  genius  of  the  slums; ” 
In  a  slum  neighborhood  a  boy  is  born  magnificently 
endowed  with  the  old  native  instincts — ambition, 
pugnacity,  adventurousness,  self-regard.  In  the 
slums,  however,  they  find  few  natural  channels  to 
flow  in  where  they  will  do  anybody  any  good.  They 
find  perverse  and  primitive  expression.  They  may 
land  their  owner  in  Sing-Sing  or  the  death  chair. 

Exactly  the  same  kind  of  boy,  however,  with  the 
same  endowment  of  native  instincts,  may  be  born  in 
a  good  home  and  may  easily  become  a  blessing  to 
the  world.  Decent  channels  are  provided  for  his 
powers.  Ambitious  for  the  victory  of  good  causes, 
a  valiant  moral  warrior  for  the  right,  a  pioneer  in 
new  social  enterprises,  with  an  expanded  person¬ 
ality  that  calls  all  men  brothers,  he  has  a  fair  chance 
to  beat  his  swords  into  ploughshares  and  his  spears 
into  pruning  hooks. 

Difficult  as  the  problem  is  in  itself,  however, 
and  complicated  as  it  is  by  adverse  circumstances, 
the  solution  of  it  still  remains  one  of  the  central 
tests  of  character.  Until  it  is  met  a  man  is  doomed 
to  live  a  disunited  life  at  cross-purposes  with  itself. 


HARNESSING  THE  CAVEMAN  161 


Part  of  him  frustrates  the  rest  of  him.  And  one 
of  the  great  tasks  of  all  true  education,  social  re¬ 
form,  and  religion  combined,  is  so  to  present  to  men 
and  make  possible  for  men  those  aims  in  life  which 
are  worth  serving,  that  men  may  choose  them,  love 
them,  become  patriots  for  them,  organize  their  lives 
around  them,  and  so  harness  all  their  fiery  energies 
to  the  service  of  the  light. 


Magnanimity 


I 

MINISTER,  serving  a  church  in  Brook¬ 
lyn  in  the  days  of  Henry  Ward  Beecher, 
tells  me  that  he  knew  a  man  who  hated 
Beecher  bitterly,  even  saying  that  he 
would  not  go  across  the  street  to  hear  him  preach. 
Later,  however,  he  came  to  be  the  famous  orator’s 
devoted  friend,  and  his  explanation  of  the  change 
was  brief  and  simple:  whenever  a  man  did  Beecher 
an  ill  turn,  Beecher  was  not  happy  until  he  had 
done  the  offender  a  good  turn.  It  came  to  be  a 
whimsical  proverb  in  Brooklyn,  “If  you  want  a 
favor  from  Beecher,  kick  him!” 

We  are  presented  here  with  a  test  of  character 
not  easy  to  meet.  For  while  our  moral  stamina 
undoubtedly  is  expressed  in  the  aggressive  and  mili¬ 
tant  virtues  with  which  we  positively  tackle  life, 
most  of  us  feel  a  severer  strain  on  our  spiritual  qual¬ 
ity  when  life  tackles  us.  He  is  a  great  man  indeed 
who  is  great,  not  only  when  he  indents  the  world, 


Ml  A  G  N  A  N I  MI  TY  163 


but  when  he  bears  with  grace  and  magnanimity  the 
hostile,  irritating  impact  of  the  world  on  him.  If 
a  man  fails  here,  what  a  multitude  of  resentments 
he  can  collect  in  a  few  years!  If  he  lets  the  slights 
and  criticisms  dig  in,  cherishes  the  insults,  ingrati¬ 
tudes  and  wrongs,  he  can  soon  cover  his  soul  with  a 
mass  of  nettles.  Sometimes  in  the  confessional, 
when  a  life  is  opened  to  me,  a  sad  sight  is  displayed 
— remembered  discourtesies,  hostilities  and  ingrati¬ 
tudes  are  everywhere ;  innumerable  ranking  grudges 
infest  the  mind;  open  a  door  anywhere  and,  be¬ 
hold,  a  resentment!  The  very  amplitude  of  our 
vocabulary  in  this  realm  bears  witness  to  the  com¬ 
monness  of  the  experience.  How  many  people  are 
habitually  peeved,  piqued,  nettled,  miffed,  pro¬ 
voked,  irritated  and  incensed! 

Characters  in  other  respects  spacious  and  admir¬ 
able  often  fail  before  this  test  of  magnanimity. 
Michelangelo  was  no  small  man,  but  when  Messer 
Biagio  da  Cesena,  the  Pope’s  Master  of  Ceremonies, 
said  that  one  of  his  pictures,  with  its  nude  figures, 
was  more  fit  for  a  place  of  debauchery  than  for  the 
Pope’s  chapel,  he  was  thoroughly  peeved.  He  drew 
Messer  Biagio’s  portrait  to  the  life  and  placed  him 
in  hell  with  horns  on  his  head  and  a  serpent  twisted 
round  his  loins.  And  he  enjoyed  a  vindictive  tri¬ 
umph  when  Messer  Biagio,  angry  at  the  laughter 
of  his  friends,  appealed  to  the  Pope  and  the  Pope 


164  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

replied:  “Had  the  painter  sent  you  to  purgatory, 
I  would  have  used  my  best  efforts  to  get  you  re¬ 
leased;  but  I  exercise  no  influence  in  hell.” 

Dante,  too,  was  a  great  character,  but  his  Divine 
Comedy  rankles  with  abuse  of  his  foes.  He  dipped 
his  pen  in  ink,  as  Browning  said,  to  print  the  stigma 
on  his  enemy's  brow  and  let  “the  wretch  go  fester¬ 
ing  through  Florence.” 

That  it  is  natural  thus  to  collect  grudges  is  obvi¬ 
ous,  but  even  those  who  so  defend  it  must  admit 
that  whenever  we  meet  a  character  that  does  not 
indulge  in  resentment  we  recognize  moral  great¬ 
ness.  Stanton  called  Lincoln  “a  low,  cunning  clown,” 
nicknamed  him  “the  original  gorilla,”  said  that 
Du  Chaillu  was  a  fool  tg  wander  all  the  way  to 
Africa  in  search  of  what  he  could  so  easily  have 
found  at  Springfield,  Illinois.  Then  Lincoln,  who 
knew  well  what  Stanton  had  said,  made  Stanton 
Secretary  of  War  because  he  was  the  best  man  for 
the  place.  Years  afterward  that  same  Stanton 
stood  at  the  bedside  of  the  martyred  President  in 
the  little  room  across  the  street  from  Ford’s  theater 
and,  looking  at  the  silent  face,  said,  “There  lies  the 
greatest  ruler  of  men  the  world  has  ever  seen.”  A 
large  part  of  Lincoln’s  hold  on  our  affections  is  due 
to  his  magnanimity.  “You  have  more  of  that  feel¬ 
ing  of  personal  resentment  than  I  have,”  he  said 
on  one  occasion.  “Perhaps  I  have  too  little  of  it, 


MAGNANIMITY 


165 


but  I  never  thought  it  paid.”  There  is  a  new  be¬ 
atitude  to  which,  when  they  see  it  incarnate,  men 
always  pay  tribute:  Blessed  is  the  life  that  does 
not  collect  resentments. 

The  plain  fact  is  that  grudge-bearing  sensitive¬ 
ness  is  one  of  the  meanest  and  most  subtle  forms  of 
egotism.  We  may  be  selfish  in  doing  positively  un¬ 
kind  deeds,  cherishing  anti-social  ambitions,  indulg¬ 
ing  in  financial  niggardliness  and  greed,  but  we  are 
just  as  likely  to  be  selfish  in  displaying  easily 
wounded  vanity  and  pride.  The  supersensitiveness 
that  continually  is  being  hurt  and,  once  hurt,  iras¬ 
cibly  cherishes  a  grudge;  the  bare  nerve  of  self  that 
waits  only  to  be'  touched  to  writhe  and,  writhing, 
tingles  with  rancor  toward  the  annoyer;  the  evil 
eye  that  watches  with  morbid  fascination  for  slight 
and  insult  and,  once  insulted,  finds  happiness  only 
in  thoughts  of  getting  even — all  this  is  sheer  egotism 
in  its  barest  and  most  repulsive  form. 

Moreover,  to  be  thus  vindictive  is  to  make  our¬ 
selves  the  slaves  of  our  enemies.  Just  as  school 
girls  easily  teased  are  soon  discovered  and  made  the 
butt  of  plaguing  boys,  so  all  conceivable  irritations 
soon  find  out  the  touchy  and  resentful  spirit.  When 
annoyance  comes,  our  greater  danger  lies,  not  in 
the  wrong  done  us,  but  in  the  wrong  we  shall  do 
ourselves  if  we  let  ourselves  be  inwardly  exasper¬ 
ated,  until  our  goodwill,  serenity  and  poise  are 


166  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

gone.  So  we  miss  the  highroad  which  Luther  in¬ 
dicated  when  he  said,  “My  soul  is  too  glad  and  too 
great  to  be  at  heart  the  enemy  of  any  man/'  or 
which  Booker  Washington  pointed  out  when  he 
said,  “  I  .  .  .  resolved  that  I  would  permit  no  man 
.  .  .  to  narrow  and  degrade  my  soul  by  making  me 
hate  him.” 

“Love  your  enemies,  and  pray  for  them  that  per¬ 
secute  you” — how  impossibly  ideal  that  seems  at 
first!  As  a  matter  of  fact,  it  is  the  most  practical 
and  rational  rule  for  daily  living  that  could  be  laid 
down.  As  Mr.  Pollock,  author  of  “The  Fool,”  ex¬ 
claimed,  describing  the  effect  of  his  first  real  read¬ 
ing  of  the  New  Testament  just  before  he  wrote  his 
play,  “The  further  I  went  in  the  New  Testament, 
the  more  I  said  to  myself,  ‘That’s  the  darnedest 
common  sense  I  ever  read!’” 

In  the  course  of  the  Armenian  atrocities  a  young 
woman  and  her  brother  were  pursued  down  the 
street  by  a  Turkish  soldier,  cornered  in  an  angle 
of  the  wall,  and  the  brother  was  slain  before  his 
sister’s  eyes.  She  dodged  down  an  alley,  leaped  a 
wall,  and  escaped.  Later,  being  a  nurse,  she  was 
forced  by  the  Turkish  authorities  to  work  in  the 
military  hospital.  Into  her  ward  was  brought,  one 
day,  the  same  Turkish  soldier  who  had  slain  her 
brother.  He  was  very  ill.  A  slight  inattention 
would  insure  his  death.  The  young  woman,  now 


MAGNANIMITY 


167 


safe  in  America,  confesses  to  the  bitter  struggle  that 
took  place  in  her  mind.  The  old  Adam  cried,  “Ven¬ 
geance”;  the  new  Christ  cried,  “Love.”  And, 
equally  to  the  man’s  good  and  to  her  own,  the  bet¬ 
ter  side  of  her  conquered,  and  she  nursed  him  as 
carefully  as  any  other  patient  in  the  ward.  The 
recognition  had  been  mutual  and  one  day,  unable 
longer  to  restrain  his  curiosity,  the  Turk  asked  his 
nurse  why  she  had  not  let  him  die,  and  when  she 
replied,  “I  am  a  follower  of  him  who  said  ‘Love 
your  enemies  and  do  them  good,’  ”  he  was  silent 
for  a  long  time.  At  last  he  spoke:  “I  never  knew 
that  there  was  such  a  religion.  If  that  is  your  re¬ 
ligion  tell  me  more  about  it,  for  I  want  it.” 

One  is  haunted  by  the  idea  that  if,  on  any  large 
scale,  Christians  should  exhibit  such  magnanimity 
as  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  enjoins,  there  would 
be  stirred  up  in  the  heart  of  this  very  bitter  and 
vindictive  world  a  wistful  response  like  the  Turk’s. 

ii 

Men  commonly  fail  in  magnanimity,  not  only  in 
relation  to  their  enemies,  but  to  their  rivals.  Jeal¬ 
ousy  is  the  twin  brother  of  vindictiveness.  All  of 
us  deal  with  three  types  of  people:  folk  less  pros¬ 
perous  than  we  are,  less  able,  less  influential ;  equals, 
whom  we  easily  meet  upon  a  common  level;  supe- 


168  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

riors,  who  overtop  and  surpass  us*.  These  last 
constitute  a  critical  moral  problem.  They  are  more 
learned  than  we  are,  more  fortunate,  more  highly 
endowed,  more  charming,  more  influential ;  they 
get  what  we  aspire  to  but  miss;  they  are  promoted 
more  swiftly  in  the  business  office,  are  rated  higher 
in  the  school,  are  praised  more  in  the  market-place. 
How  many  folk  there  are  who  can  live  kindly  with 
inferiors  and  amiably  with  equals,  but  who  grow 
hard  and  envious  as  soon  as  they  deal  with  folk  who 
surpass  them! 

To  be  sure,  not  all  superiority  in  others  is  thus 
a  temptation  to  jealousy.  We  are  not  jealous  of 
Shakspere.  We  are  not  envious  of  the  courage  of 
Livingstone  or  the  character  of  Phillips  Brooks. 
Persons  like  them  awaken  in  us  aspiration,  not 
envy,  and  the  reason  is  plain.  We  are  not  in  active 
competition  with  Livingstone  or  Brooks.  But  when 
he  who  has  been  running  just  behind  us  in  the  race 
of  life,  on  the  same  road  with  us,  strikes  up  a  swifter 
beat  and,  after  running  with  us  neck  and  neck 
awhile,  forges  ahead  and  leaves  us  behind,  then  we 
may  learn  the  meaning  of  the  Hebrew  proverb: 

Wrath  is  cruel ,  and  anger  is  overwhelming ; 

But  who  is  able  to  stand  before  jealousy? 

Disraeli  and  Gladstone  had  long  been  rivals  and 
when  Gladstone  successfully  attacked  his  oppo- 


MAGNANIMITY 


169 


nent’s  policies  in  Turkey  Disraeli  turned  on  him  and 
called  him  “a  sophistical  rhetorician,  inebriated 
with  the  exuberance  of  his  own  verbosity/’  We 
compete  with  a  rival  for  promotion  and  are  beaten, 
and  something  as  old  as  Cain  wakes  up  in  us  and 
gives  us  a  tussle  before  we  are  done  with  it.  It  is 
hard  to  be  a  good  loser.  The  quality  of  sports¬ 
manship  which  can  see  another  man  walk  off  with 
the  prize  and  still  can  praise  the  very  excellence 
by  which  we  are  surpassed  is  none  too  frequent. 

To  be  sure,  Michelangelo,  failing  at  times  in  gen¬ 
erosity  to  his  enemies,  was  famous  for  the  praise 
he  habitually  bestowed  on  other  artists’  work,  call¬ 
ing  Ghiberti’s  bronze  doors  of  the  Baptistery  in 
Florence  “the  Gates  of  Paradise.”  But  Michel¬ 
angelo  was  so  great  himself  that  he  could  afford 
such  magnanimity.  To  be  sure,  Maeterlinck,  when 
he  was  suggested  for  membership  in  the  French 
Academy,  the  first  Belgian  in  history  to  be  so 
honored,  wrote  a  letter  to  Le  Journal  asking  that 
they  choose  instead  “my  old  friend  Emile  Verhaeren, 
first,  because  he  is  my  elder;  second,  because  he  is 
a  very  great  poet,  while  I  am  only  an  industrious 
and  conscientious  prose  writer.  Any  one  with 
patience  could  write  what  I  have  written;  nobody 
could  do  what  he  has  done.  Only  a  poet  is  quali¬ 
fied  to  represent  worthily  a  nation’s  greatness  and 
heroism.”  But,  beautiful  as  such  magnanimity  is, 


170  ‘  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

“in  honor  preferring  one  another/’  Maeterlinck  was 
sufficiently  great  not  to  find  such  generosity  too 
costly.  Not  to  be  Michelangelo  or  Maeterlinck, 
however,  but  an  unknown  man  who  has  done  his 
best  and  has  seen  other  men  walk  off  with  what  he 
wanted,  who  has  planned  and  missed,  aspired  and 
failed,  and  still  to  be  magnanimous,  still  to  walk 
through  life  with  sunlit  and  unenvious  heart,  being 
his  own  best  self  and  happy  in  being  that — there  is 
a  man  who  has  won  a  victory. 

The  lack  of  this  magnanimous  spirit  is  the  cause 
of  many  rancorous  ills.  Envy  ruins  families;  the 
story  of  Cinderella  and  her  jealous  sisters  has  never 
needed  a  commentary  to  explain  it  since  the  day 
when  it  was  written.  The  crazy  extravagance  which 
is  the  curse  of  our  social  life  is  a  child  of  envy.  We 
set  a  sensible  standard  for  our  households,  but  some 
one  else  outpaces  our  less  fevered  steps  and  we 
whip  up  our  speed  to  beat  him  if  we  can.  We  do 
not  want  to  be  outdone  but  must  live  in  houses 
quite  as  large,  wear  clothes  as  fine,  travel  in  auto¬ 
mobiles  as  luxurious,  and  spend  as  freely  as  others 
do.  Jealousy  embitters  all  the  class  divisions  that 
cut  our  American  society  asunder.  It  would  be 
hard  enough  to  solve  the  problem  of  poverty  and 
wealth,  of  employee  and  employer,  if  it  were  purely 
economic.  But  it  is  everywhere  complicated  and 
embarrassed  by  jealousy.  Thomas  B.  Reed  once 


MAGNANIMITY 


171 

said:  “Whenever  I  walk  through  the  streets  of  that 
democratic  importing  city  of  New  York  and  look 
at  the  brown-stone  fronts,  my  gorge  alway  rises.  .  .  . 
When  I  feel  that  way  I  know  what  the  feeling  is. 
It  is  good,  honest,  high-minded  envy.  When  some 
other  gentlemen  have  the  same  feeling  they  think 
it’s  political  economy.” 

What  jealously  between  nations  does,  each  envy¬ 
ing  the  power  and  wealth  of  others,  is  written  in 
lines  of  blood  and  fire  across  the  world.  And  even 
when  one  comes  into  sacred  places  where  folk  in 
organized  philanthropy,  social  service  or  the  church 
are  supposedly  working  unselfishly  for  the  good 
of  men,  jealousy  is  as  present  as  it  was  on  that  last 
night  when  the  Master  with  his  disciples  ate  the 
memorials  of  his  sacrifice  and  “there  arose  also  a 
contention  among  them,  which  of  them  was  ac¬ 
counted  to  be  greatest.” 

Yet  what  fools  we  are  to  let  this  vice  steal  from 
us,  as  it  always  does,  our  independence,  our  happi¬ 
ness,  and  our  usefulness!  We  make  ourselves  the 
slaves  of  all  whom  we  envy.  Their  superiority  does 
not  harm  us,  but  our  jealousy  does.  It  is  a  great 
day  in  a  man’s  life  when  he  signs  his  own  Declara¬ 
tion  of  Independence  that  instead  of  eying  others 
with  jealous  regard,  trying  to  copy  them,  to  climb 
where  they  sit  perched,  or  to  outstrip  them  utterly, 
he  will  be  himself,  live  his  own  proper  life  in  his 


172  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

own  place,  with  his  own  gifts  and  aptitudes,  and 
will  not  spoil  the  service  he  can  render  by  worry¬ 
ing  over  the  superiority  of  other  folk. 

The  full  solution  of  the  problem  of  jealousy,  how¬ 
ever,  carries  us  much  deeper  than  mere  indepen¬ 
dence  of  spirit.  Goethe  was  right:  “Against  the  *■ 
great  superiority  of  another  there  is  no  remedy  but 
love.”  Positively  to  love  the  excellence  by  which 
we  are  surpassed,  as  though  superiority  of  genius 
and  character  were  indeed  a  “public  banquet  to 
which  we  are  all  invited,” — that  alone  takes  from 
the  mind  the  last  vestige  of  rancor.  To  care  about 
the  welfare  of  mankind  supremely,  to  rejoice  in 
better  work  than  ours  which  helps  the  cause  along, 
to  be  interested  in  the  thing  that  needs  to  be  done 
and  to  be  careless  who  gets  the  credit  for  doing 
it,  to  be  glad  of  any  chance  to  help,  and  glad,  too, 
of  any  greater  chance  than  another  may  possess, 
such  magnanimity  is  both  good  sense  and  good 
Christianity.  For  jealousy  goes  wherever  Jesus’ 
idea  of  life  comes  in:  “If  any  man  would  be  first, 
he  shall  be  last  of  all,  and  servant  of  all.” 


\ 


hi 

The  Central  Presbyterian  Church  in  Seoul,  Korea, 
used  to  be  commonly  known  as  the  “Butchers’ 


MAGNANIMITY 


173 

Church/’  and  the  nickname  still  occasionally  is 
heard.  Now,  butchers  were  one  of  the  most 
despised  castes  in  Korea.  No  butcher  could  wear 
his  hair  knotted  under  his  hat,  and  that  is  the  mark 
of  social  respectability.  One  could  kick  a  butcher 
and  he  would  not  dare  resent  it.  Then  a  Christian 
missionary  came  and  across  the  lines  of  caste  and 
race  extended  his  good-will,  so  that,  when  the  first 
church  was  founded  in  Seoul,  butchers  were  on  the 
Board  of  Elders.  Thus  the  people  came  to  nick¬ 
name  it  the  “Butchers’  Church.”  It  was  a  mark 
of  contumely  then;  it  is  a  mark  of  glory  now.  For 
one  more  exhibit  has  been  given  there  of  that  kind 
of  magnanimity  which  disregards  all  lines  of  nation, 
race,  caste,  color,  and  privilege,  and  treats  all  men 
as  individuals  upon  the  basis  of  their  human  worth. 

The  great  sins  against  magnanimity  are  three 
and  they  are  a  bad  family:  vindictiveness,  jealousy, 
and  prejudice.  You  do  not  have  to  look  far  in  most 
minds  to  find  any  one  of  them,  but  perhaps  the  most 
universal  is  prejudice.  This  man  hates  the  Jews; 
that  man  has  a  deep  dislike  of  Catholics;  and  this 
other  cannot  stand  a  Protestant.  One  man  is  sure 
that  all  Japanese  are  liars;  another  thinks  that 
every  German  or  every  Frenchman,  as  the  case  may 
be,  has  a  devil;  and,  as  for  social  lines,  “our  kind” 
are  the  elect  people  and  all  the  rest  are  more  or  less 
barbarian. 


174 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


We  lump  masses  of  human  beings  in  one  indis¬ 
criminate  confusion,  make  a  sweeping  classifica¬ 
tion,  tag  the  group  with  name  or  nickname,  and 
think  that  we  have  said  something.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  we  have  displayed  intelligence  almost  as  ele¬ 
vated  as  a  moron’s,  and  as  for  spirit  we  have  re¬ 
vealed  ourselves  the  true  successors  of  all  the  preju¬ 
diced  provincials  whose  trail  through  history  is 
marked  with  bigotry  and  blood. 

In  a  prominent  New  York  church  where  the 
crowds  were  pressing  down  the  aisles,  the  usher 
showed  a  Chinese  couple  into  a  pew  just  as  two 
Americans  had  reached  the  spot.  “Pshaw!”  ex¬ 
claimed  the  woman,  “why  did  you  let  those  heathen 
go  in  first?”  One  shrinks  from  the  proper  descrip¬ 
tion  of  that  attitude.  It  is  of  course  discourtesy, 
provincialism ;  but  it  is  more.  It  is  one  of  the  most 
contemptible  and  ruinous  sins  "which  today  are 
destroying  human  life  and  making  dangerously  dif¬ 
ficult  the  solution  of  our  social  and  international 
problems — a  bigoted  and  ignorant  prejudice  that 
lumps  and  damns  whole  classes  and  races  at  a  swoop. 
It  does  literally  what  the  slang  phrase  suggests: 
it  thinks  in  bunches. 

I  talked  recently  with  an  employer.  He  was  as 
hard  as  nails.  Whenever  he  thought  of  the  men  who 
work  with  their  hands  he  thought  of  a  labor  union, 
and  he  hated  that.  The  toiling  millions  of  America 


MAGNANIMITY  175 

were  lumped  into  one  group  and  tagged  with  a 
despised  name.  He  had  not  thought  of  them  as 
individuals — young  men  and  women  who  fall  in 
love  and  want  homes,  folks  who  have  babies  and 
cherish  for  them  the  same  ambitions  which  he  feels 
for  his,  human  beings  who  find  this  earth  a  per¬ 
plexed  and  tangled  place  in  which  to  live,  and  who 
want  more  leisure,  more  comfort,  and  more  liberty. 
So,  because  he  had  not  thought  of  them  as  indi¬ 
viduals,  he  never  had  put  himself  in  their  places 
or  understood  how  surely  in  their  places  he  would 
act  like  them.  And  the  shoe  fits  just  as  well  upon 
the  other  foot.  There  are  laboring  men  who,  think¬ 
ing  of  employers,  lump  them  in  one  mass,  marked 
“Capitalists,”  and  represented  in  their  imagination 
by  such  figures  as  Mr.  Hearst  uses  in  his  cartoons. 
We  may  suggest  what  overhead  industrial  and  inter¬ 
national  solutions  we  can  devise,  but  we  will  not  get 
far  until  we  humanize  our  thought  of  folks.  They 
are  not  primarily  Chinese,  Japanese,  Americans, 
Capitalists,  Trades  Unionists,  Jews,  Gentiles,  black, 
brown,  white,  or  yellow.  They  are  primarily  indi¬ 
vidual  human  beings  a  good  deal  like  ourselves  and 
in  many  cases  a  good  deal  better. 

In  this  day  of  so-called  “social”  thinking,  let  us 
insist  that  this  attitude  toward  individuals  is  alike 
a  test  of  character  and  a  necessary  basis  of  social 
progress.  No  joining  of  organizations,  contribu- 


f 


176  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

ting  to  budgets,  being  on  committees,  constructing 
institutions  that  propose  to  turn  out  progress  by 
quantity-production,  standardized  like  Ford  cars, 
no  long-range  endeavors  to  reform  social  situations 
in  general,  can  take  the  place  of  this  inner  test  of 
a  man’s  real  social  attitude — his  magnanimity 
toward  all  sorts  of  individuals. 

Sometime  ago  I  heard  a  group  of  children  sitting 
on  the  street  curb  and  singing  a  missionary  hymn: 

The  little  black  baby  that  rolls  in  the  sand , 

In  a  country  jar  over  the  sea, 

Is  my  African  brother,  and  Jesus  loves  him 
Just  as  he  loves  you  and  me. 

At  first  I  was  amused  to  hear  them  singing  there. 
Then  I  fell  to  meditating  on  how  easy  was  the  prob¬ 
lem  presented  to  them  so  long  as  the  little  black 
baby  was  rolling  in  the  sand  in  a  country  far  over 
the  sea.  They  did  not  have  to  deal  with  him  indi¬ 
vidually.  If  they  helped  him  at  all  they  did  it  in 
general  and  at  long  range  through  a  great  organi¬ 
zation.  But  what  a  difference  when  our  “African 
brother”  no  longer  rolls  in  the  sand  in  a  country 
far  over  the  sea,  but  moves  into  our  neighborhood, 
does  business  on  our  street,  becomes  a  servant  in 
our  home,  and  sends  his  children  to  our  school. 
Then  we  have  to  deal  wdth  him  individually.  Then 
we  have  to  be  just  to  him  if  we  can,  put  ourselves 


MAGNANIMITY  177 

in  his  place,  see  how  matters  would  appear  to  us  if 
we  had  been  born  with  a  black  skin,  and  act  ac¬ 
cordingly.  That  is  the  acid  test.  Not  the  organi¬ 
zations  we  belong  to,  not  the  creeds  we  recite,  not 
the  budgets  we  raise,  so  much  reveal  us  as  the  way 
we  treat  individuals.  And  that  conclusion  sounds 
strangely  like  something  which  Jesus  said:  “Inas¬ 
much  as  ye  did  it  unto  one  of  these  my  brethren, 
even  these  least,  ye  did  it  unto  me.” 

IV 

This,  then,  is  the  gist  of  the  whole  matter: 
friendliness  is  the  fundamental  need  of  the  world. 
Most  people  recognize  this  fact  in  so  far  as  it  con¬ 
cerns  those  inner  relationships  where  we  are  bound 
by  warm  affection  to  congenial  folk.  No  man  is 
the  whole  of  himself;  his  friends  are  the  rest  of 
him. 

But  too  many  fail  to  see  that  these  inner 
friendships  are  meant  to  be  like  hothouses,  where 
the  warm  affections,  kindly  attitudes  and  confident 
faiths  in  human  worth  may  get  their  start,  wThich 
afterward  are  to  be  transplanted  to  the  wider,  ruder, 
colder,  more  forbidding  world. 

What  is  needed  is  an  expansive  friendliness  that 
takes  in  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  people.  The 
bigger  our  cities  grow,  the  more  complicated  and 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


178 

mechanical  our  civilization  becomes,  the  more  we 
need  it. 


I  thought  the  house  across  the  way 
Was  empty;  but  since  yesterday 
Crape  on  the  door  makes  me  aware 
That  some  one  has  been  living  there. 

So  friendless  and  cold  is  much  of  our  modern  life 
in  great  cities. 

Our  very  churches  become  like  hotels  rather  than 
homes.  A  man  sits  in  the  lobby  of  a  metropolitan 
hostelry  as  lonely  as  Crusoe  on  his  island.  He  is 
not  asking  for  a  bigger  building,  or  more  garish 
decorations,  or  better  food,  or  more  convenient 
service — but  he  does  wish  that  he  were  back  in  his 
home  town  with  his  friends.  So  on  Sunday  morning, 
in  a  great  city  church,  folk  are  to  be  found  who, 
amid  the  glorious  architecture,  stirring  music  and 
highly  paid  preaching  of  a  metropolitan  cathedral, 
are  lonely — lonely,  it  may  be,  for  a  wooden  meeting 
house  on  a  country  hillside,  lighted  by  oil  lamps, 
wuth  an  organ  that  squeaks  every  time  the  boy 
pumps  it,  and  a  man  in  the  pulpit  who  cannot 
preach  for  sour  apples,  but  where  they  have 
friends. 

The  fundamental  need  of  the  world  is  friendship. 

But  friendship  is  never  adequately  understood  if 
it  is  made  merely  a  matter  of  congenial  intimacies. 


MAGNANIMITY 


179 

Friendship  is  an  expansive  spirit  that  overthrows 
vindictiveness  and  takes  in  enemies,  overpasses 
jealousy  and  embraces  rivals.  Too  great  and  too 
glad  to  be  stopped  by  prejudice,  it  seeks  the  good 
of  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  folk  across  all  the  bar¬ 
riers  that  caste,  class,  and  race  can  erect.  Such 
magnanimous  friendship  is  an  elemental  test  of 
character.  Such  undiscourageable  good-will  is  the 
indispensable  foundation  for  the  brotherhood  of 
man. 


Possessing  a  Past  Tense 


I 

IE  month  in  which  Thanksgiving  Day 
falls  reminds  us  that  a  serious  test  of 
character  is  involved  in  any  man’s 
attitude  toward  his  heritage.  For 
Thanksgiving  Day  takes  our  thought  away  from  the 
immediate  foregrounds  of  our  experience  and  re¬ 
calls  to  memory  our  historic  background.  In  this 
respect  human  life  is  like  a  landscape  where  on  the 
level  plain  our  tasks  absorb  our  usual  attention 
but  where,  above  us  and  behind  us  like  mountains, 
not  always  thought  of  but  always  there,  stand  our 
racial  traditions,  the  nations  that  begat  us,  the  fam¬ 
ilies  that  have  nourished  us,  the  heritage  that  has 
enriched  us.  This  simile  of  foreground  and  back¬ 
ground  makes  one  fact  evident:  we  can  more  or 
less  choose  our  manner  of  living  in  the  foreground 
of  our  experience,  but  the  background  we  cannot 
choose.  That  was  given  to  us.  That  is  our  inheri¬ 
tance.  We  can  choose  only  our  attitude  toward  it. 

180 


POSSESSING  A  PAST  TENSE  181 

We  can  be  grateful  for  it,  live  up  to  it,  rejoice  in 
it,  and  be  worthy  of  it,  or  we  can  forget  it,  be 
irreverent  concerning  it,  and  unappreciative  of  it. 

Fullness  of  life  is  in  part  a  matter  of  the  number 
of  tenses  which  a  man  possesses.  We  begin  in 
infancy  with  the  present  tense  alone — the  clamor¬ 
ous  needs,  absorbing  hurts,  or  satisfying  pleasures  of 
the  immediate  moment.  As  youth  comes  on  we 
acquire  a  future  tense.  We  begin  to  live,  as  Words¬ 
worth  sings,  with 

.  .  .  hope  that  can  never  die, 

Effort,  and  expectation,  and  desire, 

And  something  evermore  about  to  be. 

Then,  as  a  man  grows  older,  he  tends  to  acquire 
a  past  tense  also.  If  he  has  lived  worthily  memory 
becomes  a  shrine  with  treasures  in  it  too  sacred 
to  be  given  up,  and  far  beyond  the  borders  of  his 
individual  recollection  he  values  the  history  of  his 
race  and  the  sacrifices  which  have  purchased  his 
liberties.  One  feels  intuitively  that  a  man’s  spir¬ 
itual  quality  in  part  is  tested  by  this  possession  of 
a  past  tense. 

To  be  sure,  we  need  to  guard  ourselves  against  a 
false  glorification  of  the  past.  A  great  deal  of  non¬ 
sense  has  been  talked  about  the  “good  old  times.” 
It  is  said  that  one  of  the  oldest  documents  of  the 
race  is  a  cuneiform  fragment  from  one  of  the  lowest 
strata  of  the  ruins  of  Babylon,  beginning  with  these 


182 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


words:  “Alas!  Alas!  Times  are  not  what  they 
were!”  The  plain  fact  is  that  there  never  have 
been  any  “good  old  times,” 

Folk,  for  example,  who  wistfully  long  for  the 
ancient  days  of  religion’s  ascendency  and  who  be¬ 
moan  the  degeneracy  of  these  present  times  would 
do  well  to  consider  this.  What  good  old  times  are 
they  wishing  to  have  back  again?  Times  when 
Luther  said,  “I  am  sick  of  life  if  this  life  can 
be  called  life.  .  .  .  Implacable  hatred  and  strife 
amongst  the  great  .  .  .  no  hopes  of  any  improve¬ 
ment  .  .  .  the  age  is  Satan’s  own;  gladly  would 
I  see  myself  and  all  my  people  quickly  snatched 
from  it”?  Times  when  John  Calvin  said,  “The 
future  appals  me.  I  dare  not  think  of  it.  Unless 
the  Lord  descends  from  heaven,  barbarism  will  en¬ 
gulf  us”?  Times  when  Henry  VIILs  secretary 
wrote  in  grim  jest  to  his  friend  Erasmus  that  the 
scarcity  and  dearness  of  wood  in  England  were  due 
to  the  quantities  wasted  in  burning  heretics,  or 
when  later  the  Puritan  Cartwright,  defending  by 
Biblical  texts  the  barbarities  of  religious  persecu¬ 
tion,  exclaimed,  “If  this  be  regarded  as  extreme 
and  bloodie  I  am  glad  to  be  so  with  the  Holy 
Ghost”?  Times  when  Governor  Berkeley  of  Vir¬ 
ginia  in  1670  said,  “I  thank  God  there  are  no  free 
schools,  nor  printing,  and  I  hope  we  shall  not  have 
them  these  hundred  years;  for  learning  has  brought 


POSSESSING  A  PAST  TENSE  183 

disobedience  and  heresy  and  sects  into  the  world, 
and  printing  has  divulged  them  and  libels  against 
the  best  government.  God  keep  us  from  both”? 

What  “good  old  times?” 

Controversy  is  bad  enough  among  modern 
churchmen,  but  even  that  is  better  than  it  used  to 
be.  A  century  and  a  half  ago  some  one  wrote  a 
pamphlet  entitled,  “An  Old  Fox  Tarred  and 
Feathered.”  Who  was  the  “Old  Fox”  against  whom 
this  author  entertained  such  bitterness?  John 
Wesley,  who  for  Christ’s  sake  and  the  Gospel’s 
probably  traveled  more  miles,  did  more  work, 
preached  more  sermons,  won  more  converts,  and 
was  responsible  for  more  practical  philanthropy 
than  any  other  man  since  Paul — he  was  the  “Old 
Fox”  who  was  to  be  tarred  and  feathered.  And  if 
one  asks  who  wanted  to  tar  and  feather  him,  the 
answer  is  Toplady.  Not  Toplady  who  wrote, 

Rock  of  Ages ,  cleft  for  me, 

Let  me  hide  myself  in  thee? 

The  same  man!  He  wanted  John  Wesley  tarred 
and  feathered.  Good  old  times,  indeed! 

Nor  have  there  been  any  good  old  times  in  the 
nation — none,  at  least,  that  we  should  have  recog¬ 
nized  as  such  had  we  lived  contemporaneously 
with  them.  We  remember  with  gratitude  the  voy¬ 
age  of  the  Mayflower  as  a  glorious  adventure  of 


184  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


faith  and  enterprise,  and  so  it  was.  When  on  the 
last  day  of  May,  1919,  Lieutenant  A.  C.  Read,  the 
first  man  to  cross  the  Atlantic  in  the  air,  brought  his 
seaplane  safely  down  in  the  harbor  of  Plymouth, 
England,  he  was  officially  welcomed  by  the  mayor 
of  that  ancient  town  and  an  applauding  multitude. 
The  whole  world  was  agog  at  the  achievement  and 
enthusiastic  over  it.  But  when  the  Mayflower 
sailed  from  that  same  spot  three  centuries  before, 
there  was  no  applause;  few  knew  and  fewer  cared; 
the  adventure  was  an  obscure  and  apparently  in¬ 
significant  affair.  Had  we  been  there  nothing  could 
have  persuaded  us  that  we  were  living  in  any  “good 
old  times.” 

Here  is  part  of  a  letter  written  by  Robert  Cush¬ 
man  on  board  the  Mayflower  before  she  finally  left 
England : 

“If  ever  we  make  a  Plantation  God  works  a  miracle! 
Specially  considering  how  scant  we  shall  be  of  victuals, 
and,  most  of  all,  ununited  amongst  ourselves.  .  .  . 

“If  I  should  write  to  you  of  all  things  which  promiscu¬ 
ously  forerun  our  ruin,  I  should  overcharge  my  weak 
head  and  grieve  your  tender  heart:  only  this  I  pray  you, 
Prepare  for  evil  tidings  of  us,  every  day!  But  pray 
for  us  instantly!  ...  I  see  not,  in  reason,  how  we  shall 
escape  .  .  .  but  God  can  do  much,  and  his  will  be  done!” 

Possessing  a  past  tense  does  not  mean  a  false 
idealization  of  days  gone  by.  It  does  not  involve 


POSSESSING  A  PAST  TENSE  185 

subjection  to  the  tyranny  of  the  dead  hand.  One 
need  not  deny  the  fact  of  progress  nor  blind  his 
eyes  to  the  miseries  and  sins  of  our  fathers.  But, 
for  all  that,  condescension  to  the  past  or  smashing 
attacks  on  its  failures  cannot  exhaust  a  wise  man’s 
attitude.  Thanksgiving  Day  does  represent  an 
essential  element  in  a  good  man’s  life. 

ii 

The  plain  fact  is  that  the  biggest  part  of  our  lives 
is  our  heritage.  One  must  differentiate  here  be¬ 
tween  blood  heredity  and  social  inheritance.  The 
first  is  a  matter  of  the  physical  and  mental  traits 
which  we  carry  over  biologically  from  our  fore¬ 
bears;  the  second  is  a  matter  of  the  social  environ¬ 
ments,  the  literary,  artistic,  religious  traditions,  the 
racial  and  national  culture,  into  which  we  are  born 
and  by  which  our  plastic  lives  are  shaped  and 
molded.  Even  yet  we  do  not  know  so  much  about 
biological  heredity  as  some  glib  amateurs  who  write 
upon  the  subject  seem  to  think,  but  this  we  do 
know:  If  wre  had  been  born  of  the  most  select 
eugenic  blood  that  could  be  imagined  and  had  been 
dropped  as  infants  into  an  African  jungle  tribe,  we 
should  have  grown  up  molded  and  conformed  by 
the  social  heritage  of  that  tribe’s  traditions.  We 
should  have  believed  in  its  witchcraft,  feared  its 


186 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


devils,  trusted  its  medicine  men  and  respected  its 
taboos.  No  blood  heredity  could  have  been  strong 
enough  to  withstand  the  all  but  irresistible  pres¬ 
sure  of  the  social  inheritance. 

So  strong  is  the  social  heritage  that,  when  by 
some  powerful  force  it  is  given  a  new  direction,  it 
can  transform  whole  nations,  Japan  today  is  be¬ 
ing  made  over  with  amazing  rapidity,  not  by  any 
change  in  biological  heredity,  but  by  the  acceptance 
of  many  influential  elements  in  the  social  heritage 
of  the  West. 

On  Thanksgiving  morning,  1868,  Henry  Ward 
Beecher,  in  the  course  of  his  sermon  in  Plymouth 
pulpit,  said:  “My  old  fatherland  is  Germany,  the 
home  of  our  Anglo-Saxon  blood.  The  old  honest 
stock,  the  old  sincere  stock,  the  old  domestic  stock, 
it  is.  It  is  the  Saxon  stock  that  always  ran  toward 
republicanism.  The  monarchical  stock — the  French 
stock,  the  Italian  stock,  the  Spanish  stock — all  ran 
toward  Monarchism.  .  .  .  But  the\  Saxon  stock  al¬ 
ways  ran  for  the  common  people  and  the  com¬ 
monwealth.”  How  great  a  difference  one  finds 
when  he  turns  suddenly  from  1868  to  1914!  Noth¬ 
ing  had  happened  to  the  blood  heredity  of  the 
German  people,  but  something  had  happened  to 
their  social  inheritance.  That  had  been  radically 
altered  by  influences  whose  figurehead  in  our  imag¬ 
ination  is  Bismarck,  until  children  were  being 


POSSESSING  A  PAST  TENSE  187 

born  in  1914  into  a  social  tradition  far  different 
from  that  of  the  peace-loving,  domestic,  artistic 
and  democratic  Saxon  folk  of  1868. 

The  thesis  is  not  difficult  to  establish.  Among 
the  most  influential  factors  in  our  lives  is  surely  our 
social  heritage. 

Many  modern  folk  have  a  quite  unjustified  sense 
of  intellectual  superiority  over  their  ancestors  be¬ 
cause  so  many  evils  which  our  forebears  took  for 
granted  we  would  not  endure,  and  so  many  social 
improvements  which  seemed  to  them  impossible 
we  take  for  granted.  But  the  difference  between 
us  and  our  ancestors  does  not  lie  primarily  in  indi¬ 
vidual  increase  of  mental  power  on  our  part.  There 
is  no  evidence  that  any  man’s  intellect  on  earth 
today  is  equal  to  Aristotle’s,  nor  do  we  know  with 
any  surety  that  the  brain  capacity  of  mankind  as  a 
whole  is  greater  now  than  it  was  in  the  Ice  Age. 
What  has  happened  is  mainly  the  slow  accumulation 
of  a  social  heritage.  By  long  and  patient  processes 
of  aspiring,  thinking,  trying,  daring,  and  sacri¬ 
ficing,  mankind  has  accumulated  a  cultural  inheri¬ 
tance.  That  democracy  can  be  made  to  work,  that 
by  the  scientific  method  we  can  gain  mastery  over 
the  latent  resources  of  the  universe,  that  trial  by 
jury  is  practicable,  that  torture  is  a  foolish  method 
of  seeking  evidence  in  the  courts,  that  chattel  slav¬ 
ery  is  a  failure — such  things  we  take  for  granted, 


188  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

not  because  we  individually  are  wiser  than  our  fore¬ 
bears,  who  disbelieved  them  all,  but  because  we 
share  in  a  social  tradition  which  we  did  not  even 
help  to  create,  but  which  has  shaped  and  conformed 
our  thinking  with  irresistible  power. 

As  one  ponders  this  overwhelming  influence  of 
our  social  heritage,  Thanksgiving  Day  gathers 
fresh  significance.  If  we  do  possess  in  our  racial  and 
national  inheritance  institutions  and  ideas  of  price¬ 
less  value,  purchased  by  the  sacrifice  of  past  gener¬ 
ations,  we  would  better  appreciate  them  and  take 
care  of  them.  And  if  in  our  social  heritage  there 
are  perilous  traditions  and  tendencies,  we  would 
better  expunge  them. 

Suppose,  for  example,  that  in  our  generation  we 
should  outlaw  war,  should  build  substitutes  in  inter¬ 
national  cooperation  to  serve  the  purposes  which 
war  has  tried  to  serve  and  lamentably  has  failed 
in.  Suppose  that  the  whole  war  system  should  col¬ 
lapse  and  machine  guns  go  into  the  museums  with 
the  wracks  and  thumbscrews.  Then  our  children 
would  find  war  unthinkable,  not  because  they  indi¬ 
vidually  were  wiser  and  better  than  we,  but  because 
we  had  created  a  new  social  tradition  which  would 
shape  the  international  attitudes  of  everybody  born 
into  it. 


POSSESSING  A  PAST  TENSE 


189 


ill 

The  initial  response  of  a  fine-natured  man  when 
he  thinks  of  the  best  elements  in  his  civilization  and 
of  the  sacrifices  which  they  have  cost  is  gratitude. 
That,  in  itself,  is  an  ennobling  sentiment  and  in 
personal  relationships  is  indispensable.  No  ingrate 
is  fit  to  live. 

The  grace  of  gratitude,  however,  ought  to  extend 
itself  to  the  whole  social  background  of  our  lives, 
for  the  obvious  reason  that  we  all  have  two  kinds 
of  possessions:  some  we  worked  for,  won  for  our¬ 
selves  by  our  own  creative  skill;  others  were  given 
us  to  start  with.  Now,  these  two  kinds  of  posses¬ 
sions — the  things  we  achieve  and  the  things  we  in¬ 
herit — demand  of  us  two  different  attitudes.  The 
first  kind  requires  strenuousness;  the  second  re¬ 
quires  appreciation.  We  win  the  first  by  work;  we 
win  the  second  by  thankful  receptivity.  So  an  au¬ 
thor  will  have  upon  his  shelves  two  sorts  of  books. 
Some  he  wrote  himself.  They  are  the  output  of  his 
strenuous  mental  toil.  The  others  are  what  Milton 
called  “the  precious  life-blood  of  a  master  spirit”; 
they  were  written,  not  by  the  man,  but  for  him; 
they  are  a  part  of  his  heritage  and  through  apprecia¬ 
tion  they  are  his. 

As  between  these  two  types  of  possessions  we 
Americans  notoriously  have  been  obsessed  by  the 


190  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

first.  We  think  chiefly  of  things  to  be  achieved.  In 
consequence  we  are  very  energetic,  ambitious,  push¬ 
ing.  But  we  are  not  inwardly  rich.  Strenuously 
absorbed  in  things  to  be  done  by  us,  we  too  often 
forget,  to  appreciate  some  glorious  things  that 
already  have  been  done  for  us.  If  some  one  is 
tempted  to  say  that  strenuousness  is  hard  and  ap¬ 
preciation  easy,  he  displays  his  ignorance. 

A  deep  and  reverent  understanding  of  and  grati¬ 
tude  for  the  best  heritage  of  the  race  is  one  of  the 
fairest  and  rarest  fruits  of  a  mature  soul. 

One  who  lacks  this  expanded  sense  of  indebted¬ 
ness  to  the  past  is  like  a  town  I  once  visited.  “Thir¬ 
teen  years  ago/’  said  my  friend  as  he  waved  his 
hand  out  toward  it,  “there  was  nothing  here — and 
now  look  at  it!”  I  did  look  at  it.  It  was  very  raw. 
It  was  painfully  extempore.  It  had  all  the  virtues 
of  enterprising  youth — briskness,  energy,  expec¬ 
tancy — but  it  had  the  obvious  lacks  of  youth  as 
well.  It  had  no  past  tense.  As  I  looked  at  it  I 
thought  of  other  towns  which  also  have  a  present 
and  a  future,  but  which  have  a  past  as  well.  One 
is  aware  in  them  of  days  gone  by  and,  it  may  be,  of 
high  doings  when  folk  thought  and  died  for  great 
causes.  The  past  is  not  everything,  and  any  genera¬ 
tion  or  any  man  that  tries  to  make  it  everything  is 
lost.  But  neither  are  the  present  and  the  future 


POSSESSING  A  PAST  TENSE 


191 


everything.  It  is  an  ennobling  experience  to  have 
a  great  past  and  to  be  gratefully  aware  of  it. 

How  often  one  wishes  that  he  could  get  hold  of 
those  easy-going  batteners  on  public  privileges,  who 
saunter  into  life  as  though  it  all  belonged  to  them 
in  fee  simple  to  possess,  with  no  sense  of  indebted¬ 
ness  to  the  social  heritage  and  with  no  conscious¬ 
ness  of  what  it  cost!  How  much  one  wishes  that 
he  could  back  them  into  a  corner  from  which  they 
could  not  escape  and  talk  to  them  like  this: 

You  are  taking  for  granted  what  you  have  no 
business  to  take  for  granted.  You  act  as  though  it 
were  a  negligible  matter  that  for  innumerable  gen¬ 
erations  forward-looking  men,  paying  a  price  in  sac¬ 
rifice  which  no'  imagination  can  compute,  have  been 
building  up  the  decencies,  securities,  and  oppor¬ 
tunities  of  civilized  life.  The  greatest  day  in  any 
man’s  life,  as  another  put  it,  is  when  he  turns  the 
corner  of  a  street  and  runs  into  a  new  idea.  That 
is  the  greatest  day  in  any  civilization’s  life,  as  well, 
and  in  our  Western  world  it  has  happened  three 
times. 

Once  our  civilization  turned  the  corner  of  a  street 
and  ran  into  Jesus  of  Nazareth.  It  never  has  been 
the  same  world  since.  Something  happened  at  that 
meeting  from  which  humanity  never  will  be  able  to 
escape  and  never  ought  to  wish  to  escape. 

Again,  our  civilization  turned  the  corner  of  a 


192  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

street  and  ran  into  the  idea  that  if  we  patiently 
study  the  laws  of  nature  we  can  gain  such  control 
over  nature’s  law-abiding  forces  as  will  enable  us 
to  transform  the  world.  That,  too,  was  a  momen¬ 
tous  day.  This  never  has  been  the  same  earth  since 
and  it  never  will  be. 

Again,  our  civilization  turned  the  corner  of  a 
street  and  ran  into  the  idea  that  all  of  the  people 
can  be  trusted  in  cooperative  responsibility  to  bear 
a  hand  together  in  framing  laws  which  then  all  the 
people  together  will  obey.  It  was  a  prodigious  idea. 
The  arguments  against  it  are  clear,  the  perils  of  it 
obvious.  It  was  an  adventure  in  comparison  with 
which  Magellan’s  exploit  was  simple. 

The  principles  of  Jesus,  the  power  of  applied 
science,  the  idea  of  democracy — from  these  three 
things  the  most  hopeful  elements  of  our  civiliza¬ 
tion  flow.  These  things  are  the  heart  of  the  heritage 
which  we  hold  in  trust  from  our  fathers  before  us 
for  our  children  after  us.  God  pity  the  man  who 
ever  grows  so  sophisticated  that  the  thrill  drops  out 
from  any  one  of  them ! 


IV 

Indeed,  at  this  special  juncture  of  the  world’s 
history,  few  things  need  more  to  be  driven  home  on 
the  public  conscience  than  this  simple  but  ominous 


POSSESSING  A  PAST  TENSE 


193 


fact:  it  is  a  good  deal  easier  to  waste  a  patrimony 
than  it  is  to  make  one.  One  of  the  elemental  mys¬ 
teries  of  life  is  that  destruction  is  easier  than  con¬ 
struction.  It  took  a  long  time  and  hard  toil  to  build 
the  Temple  of  Diana  at  Ephesus,  one  of  the  seven 
wonders  of  the  world,  but  a  mad  youth  who  wanted 
his  name  remembered  threw  a  single  torch,  and  in 
one  night  the  temple  was  destroyed.  It  is  easy  to 
waste  what  it  is  hard  to  build. 

This  truth  ought  to  come  home  to  our  generation 
with  special  emphasis  because  these  have  been 
prodigal  years  through  which  we  have  been  living. 
Ever  since  1914  the  world  as  a  whole  has  been 
spending  its  patrimony.  One  does  not  mean  money 
alone,  although  a  war  that  cost  $186,000,000,000  is 
bad  enough.  One  does  not  mean  human  life  alone, 

although  10,000,000  dead  on  the  battlefield  is  an 

* 

expenditure  not  easy  to  exaggerate.  One  does  not 
mean  creative  art  alone,  although  one  who  has 
seen  a  ruined  Gothic  cathedral  will  readily  agree 
that  it  is  easier  to  waste  than  to  build.  One  does 
not  mean  domestic  life  and  happiness  alone,  al¬ 
though  one  who  has  walked  through  a  ruined  city 
like  Bapaume,  a  skeleton  in  stone  of  what  wras  once 
a  living  town,  will  not  easily  forget  its  horror. 
Rather,  all  these  separate  items  of  wastage  are  but 
symptomatic  of  that  spendthrift  prodigality  which 
has  been  throwing  away  and  still  is  throwing  away 


194  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

great  opportunities  on  which  the  weal  of  mankind 
depends. 

One  who  loves  ancient  Greece  turns  back  in  days 
like  these  to  the  fifth  century  B.  C.  Man  was  there 
presented  with  one  of  the  supreme  chances  that  his¬ 
tory  records.  The  Persians  had  been  driven  back 
into  Asia;  Europe  was  safe  and  Greece  was  the  hope 
of  it.  Democracy  was  understood  in  Greece  as  it 
was  not  going  to  be  understood  again  for  centuries. 
Science  was  growing  in  Greece  as  it  would  not  grow 
again  until  the  Middle  Ages  had  come  and  gone. 
Socrates  and  Plato  were  teaching  truths  about  God 
and  immortality  that  would  not  be  so  well  taught 
again  for  five  hundred  years.  Then  with  this  patri¬ 
mony  in  their  hands,  the  Greeks  wasted  it.  Athens 
and  Sparta,  who  should  have  stood  together  for  the 
furtherance  of  their  heritage,  fought  through  long 
years  of  bloody  warfare  for  the  selfish  leadership  of 
Greece.  That  struggle  was  a  fatal  blow  to  Greek 
civilization.  They  threw  away  their  heritage. 

In  spite  of  the  startling  resemblance  between  that 
old  situation  and  ours,  we  still  may  hope  that  the 
chance  for  Western  civilization  is  not  yet  gone. 
Only,  we  cannot  be  prodigals  and  waste  it  any  more. 
We  must  have  men  and  women  who  understand  the 
priceless  values  handed  down  to  us.  We  must 
learn  to  fear  and  hate  our  spendthrift  ways.  As 
long  as  this  generation  lasts,  an  urgent  need  will 


POSSESSING  A  PAST  TENSE 


195 


press  upon  us  for  constructive  spirits  in  home, 
church,  nation,  world.  We  cannot  stand  wasters, 
A  little  more  careless,  thankless  prodigality  and  our 
patrimony  will  be  finished. 

v 

To  this  end  we  in  America  may  well  refresh  at 
Thanksgiving  time  our  conviction  that  we  have  a 
great  heritage  worth  keeping  and  improving,  and 
may  well  resist  the  too  fashionable  impression  that 
our  chief  business  with  the  past  is  to  escape  from  it. 
The  idea  of  progress  has  created  that  impression. 
We  take  it  for  granted  that  since  the  world  is  pro¬ 
gressing  we,  of  course,  are  better  than  our  sires.  We 
should  not  be  too  sure  of  that.  It  is  none  too  clear, 
in  spite  of  M.  Coue,  that  “every  day  in  every  way 
we  are  getting  better  and  better/’ 

To  be  sure,  we  use  electric  lights  where  our 
fathers  used  tallow  dips,  and  ride  in  express  trains 
where  they  had  to  go  in  ox-carts.  To  be  sure,  we 
can  say  “Hello!”  over  a  wire  to  a  man  a  thousand 
miles  away,  and  our  houses  are  filled  with  comforts 
and  conveniences  of  which  a  medieval  king  never 
dreamed.  And  when  we  undergirdle  such  material 
advances  with  a  doctrine  of  evolution  popularly  mis¬ 
interpreted  to  mean  that  we  are  all  upon  a  funicular 
railroad  going  up,  no  matter  what  we  do,  we  gain 


196 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


a  happy-go-lucky  philosophy  of  life.  But  it  is 
worth  considering  that  it  always  is  possible  to  im¬ 
prove  the  instruments  of  life  and  still  to  leave  life 
itself  static  and  unredeemed. 

The  plain  fact  is  that  man's  life  and  progress  do 
not  consist  in  the  abundance  of  the  things  that  he 
possesses. 

Is  the  spirit  of  our  homelife  in  America  better 
than  our  fathers’?  The  old  New  England  family 
has  been  made  to  seem  hopelessly  dour,  somber  and 
lugubrious,  but  one  has  doubts  about  the  picture 
when  he  runs  upon  a  letter  like  this,  written  by 
John  Winthrop  to  his  wife  in  1637,  after  they  had 
been  married  twenty  years: 

“Sweetheart, — 

I  was  unwillingly  hindered  from  coming  to  thee,  nor 
am  I  likely  to  see  thee  before  the  last  day  of  this  week: 
therefore  I  shall  want  a  band  or  two:  and  cuffs.  I  pray 
thee  also  send  me  six  or  seven  leaves  of  tobacco  dried 
and  powdered.  Have  care  of  thyself  this  cold  weather, 
and  speak  to  the  folks  to  keep  the  goats  well  out  of  the 
garden.  ...  If  any  letters  be  come  for  me,  send  them 
by  this  bearer.  I  will  trouble  thee  no  further.  The 
Lord  bless  and  keep  thee,  my  sweet  wife,  and  all  our 
family;  and  send  us  a  comfortable  meeting.  So  I  kiss 
thee  and  love  thee  ever  and  rest 

Thy  faithful  husband, 


John  Winthrop.” 


POSSESSING  A  PAST  TENSE  197 

All  I  have  to  remark  is  that  if  this  is  being  a 
somber  Puritan,  I  wish  that  we  had  more  homes  in 
America  similarly  Puritanical  after  twenty  years. 

Is  our  inward  spiritual  life  better  than  our  fa¬ 
thers’?  It  is  easy  to  caricature  the  religion  of  our 
sires.  To  win  a  chance  to  laugh  at  it  one  need  only 
suppose  it  identical  with  the  intellectual  formula¬ 
tions  and  practical  expressions  which  were  char¬ 
acteristic  of  their  time.  But,  surely,  the  moral  pith 
of  our  fathers’  faith  was  no  laughing  matter.  They 
were  God-fearing  men  in  this  deep  sense:  they 
feared  God  so  much  that  they  did  not  fear  anybody 
else  at  all.  An  aged  minister  gave  me  the  blessing 
of  the  older  generation  on  the  day  I  was  ordained 
for  the  ministry.  He  stood  at  the  end  of  a  long  life 
and  I  at  the  beginning  of  mine.  This  was  his  bene¬ 
diction:  “Young  man,  never  you  fear  the  face  of 
mortal  clay!”  That  was  the  spirit  of  the  fathers  at 
their  best  and  it  is  a  great  heritage. 

There  is  a  kind  of  patriotism  which  the  sooner 
we  end  the  better.  It  is  narrow,  bigoted,  sectarian, 
provincial;  it  lives  on  prejudice  and  it  makes  for 
war.  But  there  is  a  patriotism  that  need  never 
end,  though  internationalism  grow  and  bloom  and 
bear  its  long-prayed-for  fruit.  To  be  devoted  to 
the  best  spiritual  traditions  of  your  own  land,  to  be 
glad  about  them,  to  be  proud  of  them,  to  rejoice  in 
them,  to  want  to  live  up  to  them,  and  be  worthy  of 


198  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


them,  and  because  of  them  to  hope  and  work  that 
the  Republic  may  play  an  honorable  part  in  the 
world’s  life, — that  is  great  patriotism.  May  it  never 
end! 


The  Power  to  See  It  Through 


I 

NTERESTING  statistics  have  been  com¬ 
piled  by  insurance  actuaries  with  refer¬ 
ence  to  the  prospects  of  a  hundred 
average  young  men  twenty-five  years  of 
age  starting  out  in  business.  The  results  are  de¬ 
cidedly  disconcerting.  Forty  years  afterward,  when 
those  young  men  are  sixty-five  years  old,  they  will 
on  the  average  have  fallen  into  the  following  classes: 
thirty-six  dead,  fifty-four  financially  dependent  on 
family  or  charity,  five  barely  able  to  make  their 
own  living,  four  well-to-do,  one  rich.  If  we  dis¬ 
count  the  unfairness  and  ill  fortune  of  external 
circumstance  which  doubtless  are  involved  in  this 
lame  finish  of  many  good  beginnings,  we  still  have 
left  a  large  amount  of  inability  to  see  life  through 
which  must  be  due  to  lack  of  character.  A  very 
serious  test  of  human  fiber  is  involved  in  the  fact 
that  there  are  so  many  good  beginnings  and  poor 
endings. 


199 


200  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

The  qualities  which  lead  a  man  to  launch  out  on 
an  enterprise  with  promising  enthusiasm  may  be 
accompanied  by  a  lack  of  those  qualities  which  will 
see  him  through  to  a  successful  finish.  Good  start¬ 
ers  and  good  stayers  are  not  necessarily  the  same 
people.  Ardor,  excitement,  susceptibility  to  sudden 
feeling,  the  flare  of  good  intentions — such  forces  set 
men  going,  but  they  do  not  enable  men  to  carry  on 
when  the  going  is  hard.  That  requires  another  kind 
of  moral  energy  which  evidently  is  not  so  common 
as  the  first.  Plenty  of  people  are  equipped  with 
efficient  self-starters.  They  get  away  easily.  They 
are  off  with  a  fleet  eagerness  that  wakens  high  ex¬ 
pectations,  but  they  peter  out;  they  soon  stick  in 
the  sand  or  stall  on  a  high  hill. 

Nevertheless,  even  in  our  individual  enterprises, 
much  more  in  our  whole  life’s  meaning,  the  ultimate 
test  is  our  ability  to  finish.  In  one  of  our  Federal 
prisons  today  is  a  man  who  for  fifty  years  with  un¬ 
blemished  reputation  lived  a  life  of  probity  and 
honor  in  his  own  community.  Then,  as  a  govern¬ 
ment  servant,  he  went  to  France  during  the  war 
and  mishandled  funds.  Only  that  will  be  remem¬ 
bered  about  him.  The  half  century  of  fine  living 
is  blotted  out.  He  was  not  able  to  finish. 

Even  when  the  problem  presents  itself  in  less 
dramatic  terms,  it  still  is  there.  All  biography  is  a 
commentary  on  the  necessity  of  seeing  life  through. 


THE  POWER  TO  SEE  IT  THROUGH  201 


Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  in  the  nineteenth  century 
maintained  an  extraordinary  relationship  with 
Samuel  Johnson  in  the  eighteenth  century.  Holmes 
was  born  in  the  late  summer  of  1809;  Johnson  was 
born  in  the  early  autumn  of  1709  and  had  written 
about  him  the  most  exhaustive  biography  ever 
penned.  “Thus  there  was  established/’  wrote 
Holmes  in  his  old  age,  “a  close  bond  of  relation¬ 
ship  between  the  great  English  scholar  and  writer 
and  myself.  Year  by  year,  and  almost  month  by 
month,  my  life  has  kept  pace  in  this  century  with 
his  life  in  the  last  century.  I  had  only  to  open  my 
Boswell  at  any  time,  and  I  knew  just  what  Johnson 
at  my  age,  twenty  or  fifty  or  seventy,  was  thinking 
and  doing;  what  were  his  feelings  about  life;  what 
changes  the  years  had  wrought  in  his  body,  his 
mind,  his  feelings,  his  companionships,  his  reputa¬ 
tion.  It  was  for  me  a  kind  of  unison  between  two 
instruments,  both  playing  that  old  familiar  air, 
‘Life/ — one  a  bassoon,  if  you  will,  and  the  other  an 
oaten  pipe,  if  you  care  to  find  an  image  for  it,  but 
still  keeping  pace  with  each  other,  until  the  players 
both  grew  old  and  grey.” 

Then,  one  day,  Holmes  wrote,  “A  hundred  years 
ago  this  day,  December  13,  1784,  died  the  admirable 
and  ever  to  be  remembered  Dr.  Samuel  Johnson. 

.  .  .  I  feel  lonely  now  that  my  great  companion 
and  friend  of  so  many  years  has  left  me.” 


202  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


Whenever  through  the  pages  of  a  favorite  biog¬ 
raphy  one  so  lives  vicariously  in  another’s  expe¬ 
riences,  he  runs  inevitably  upon  this  elemental  fact 
about  life — it  has  to  be  lived  to  its  finish.  Living 
is  a  good  deal  like  splitting  a  rock — the  workman 
lifts  his  iron  maul  and  brings  it  down  repeatedly 
upon  the  seam  until  the  deed  is  done.  If,  now,  one 
ask  which  blow  split  the  rock,  it  is  clear  that  they 
all  did.  Yet  without  the  last  one  the  first  and  all 
between  would  have  come  to  nothing.  Many  lives 
fail  from  inability  to  deliver  the  last  blow. 

ii 

This  is  evident  to  any  one  who  watches  the  moral 
collapses  of  maturity.  We  continually  stress  the 
temptation,  perils  and  failures  of  youth.  Ours  has 
been  called  “the  children’s  century,”  and  some  of 
the  characteristic  attitudes  of  our  generation  make 
the  name  appropriate.  One  of  our  writers  is  even 
reported  to  have  said  that  it  makes  little  difference 
what  happens  to  a  boy  after  he  is  twelve  years  old. 
We  are  keenly  sensitive  to  the  problems  of  child¬ 
hood;  we  have  thoroughly  learned' the  proverb  that 
just  as  the  twig  is  bent  the  tree’s  inclined;  we  feel 
confident  that  if  we  can  give  a  boy  a  good  beginning 
we  can  insure  him  against  a  bad  ending. 

Important  as  is  the  truth  involved  in  this  empha¬ 
sis,  it  is  only  a  half-truth.  Some  men  are  like  rivers 


THE  POWER  TO  SEE  IT  THROUGH  203 

which  flow  out  through  dangerous  rapids  in  their 
early  course  into  calm  currents  of  maturity.  But 
other  men  are  like  Niagara  River — beginning  with 
a  full,  deep,  powerful  stream  and  breaking  in  its 
latter  course  into  such  tumultuous  rapids  and 
waterfalls  as  no  river  at  its  beginning  can  ever 
know.  “Call  no  man  happy  till  he  is  dead”  is  a 
cynical  proverb,  but  it  springs  from  an  important 
insight  into  human  experience.  The  collapses  of 
maturity  are  quite  as  perilous  as  the  callowness  of 
youth. 

For  one  thing,  maturity  often  has  to  handle  the 
problem  of  success.  When  we  were  young  we  had 
our  way  to  make  and  we  went  to  the  task  with  all 
the  resources  of  courage  and  determination  which 
we  could  muster.  We  knew  that  it  would  not  be  an 
easy  fight  and  we  were  resolved  that,  if  we  lost, 
defeat  would  not  be  due  to  any  lack  of  hard,  clean 
hitting  on  our  part.  The  very  struggle  to  succeed 
is  often  a  strong  protector  of  ambitious  youth.  But 
when  in  our  maturity  we  have  in  some  measure  suc¬ 
ceeded,  have  won  recognition,  standing,  influence, 
it  may  be  wealth,  then  comes  one  of  the  most 
crucial  moral  conflicts  which  a  man  can  face.  It  is 
one  thing  to  succeed;  it  is  another  to  be  fit  to 
succeed. 

Many  a  man  has  made  a  clean  hit  in  youth,  has 
gotten  to  first  base,  has  run  to  second,  has  reached 


204 


TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


third;  he  is  very  well  content  with  himself — he  is 
succeeding  finely — and  then  he  is  caught  napping 
off  third  when  there  is  no  need  of  it,  when  all  his 
friends  are  counting  on  him  to  get  home. 

It  is  a  common  fallacy  to  suppose  that  men  are 
tempted  where  they  are  weak.  Upon  the  contrary, 
it  is  about  men’s  powers  that  temptations  grow 
turbulent  like  swirling  waters  around  a  rock.  The 
possession  of  promising  talent  opens  the  way  for 
its  misuse.  A  young  student  of  law  to  whom  Black- 
stone  is  still  a  stranger  is  not  tempted  to  sell  his 
soul  pleading  an  evil  case.  But  when  he  has 
achieved  mastery  of  the  law,  with  the  prestige  and 
power  that  go  with  it,  he  surely  will  be  tempted 
to  misuse  his  acumen  and  resourcefulness. 

Temptations  deal  with  life  as  winds  do  with 
trees;  the  taller  the  tree  the  more  the  tempests 
wrestle  with  it.  One  wonders,  therefore,  if  statistics 
were  available,  whether  more  failures  would  be 
registered  in  youth  or  in  maturity.  Many  men,  for 
example,  cannot  stand  financial  success.  Getting 
money  may  develop  their  characters ;  having  it 
ruins  them.  An  old  legend  says  that  Moses  used  to 
play  the  shepherd’s  pipe  as  he  tended  his  flocks 
upon  the  plains  of  Midian  and  that  when  he  went 
up  to  die  on  Nebo’s  top  he  gave  his  old  flute  to  the 
priests,  who  used,  on  high  occasions,  to  play  it 
before  the  Lord.  In  time,  however,  it  seemed  un- 


THE  POWER  TO  SEE  IT  THROUGH  205 

worthy  that  this  simple  shepherd’s  pipe  should  have 
touched  the  great  Moses’  lips;  so  they  covered  it 
with  gold.  But  the  gilded  instrument  would  play 
no  more;  it  shone  externally  but  it  was  mute. 

Even  intellectual  success  can  prove  ruinous. 
Some  years  ago  a  man  wandered  up  and  down  the 
Bowery  in  New  York  selling  shoestrings  for  the 
drinks.  According  to  our  typical  modern  emphasis 
we  should  imagine  behind  him  some  evil  home 
where  he  was  damned  into  the  world.  Upon  the 
contrary,  he  came  from  a  fine  home,  had  every  op¬ 
portunity,  graduated  with  a  Phi  Beta  Kappa  key 
from  one  of  our  oldest  and  greatest  universities,  and 
flowered  out  with  every  promise  into  his  profes¬ 
sional  career.  He  collapsed  after  a  splendid  start. 
His  biography  could  be  summed  up  in  the  words  of 
Jesus’  parable  :  ‘This  man  began  to  build,  and  was 
not  able  to  finish.” 


hi 

The  collapses  of  maturity  are  due,  not  alone  to 
the  increase  of  power,  but  also  to  the  impact  of 
trouble.  Out  of  a  sheltered  and  fortunate  youth 
many  a  man  goes  into  a  maturity  where  disappoint¬ 
ment  piles  on  disappointment,  and  trouble,  like  a 
battering  ram,  hits  again  and  again  the  same  spot 
in  his  walls,  until  the  foundations  shake.  Maturity 
has  to  deal  with  facts  much  more  tragic  than  youth 


206  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

knows.  Youth  thinks  of  William  Penn  serene  in  his 
success,  as  the  statue  on  the  State  house  in  Phila¬ 
delphia  pictures  him,  but  maturity  knows  that 
William  Penn  lived  anything  but  a  serene  life.  His 
wife  died;  his  son  became  a  leader  among  the  pro¬ 
fligates  of  the  city;  he  was  publicly  accused  of 
treason  to  the  Government  and  was  imprisoned 
more  than  once ;  his  estates  in  England  were 
ruined  by  unjust  taxation;  he  was  compelled  to 
cede  away  all  his  holdings  in  America  ;  and  at  last 
an  apoplectic  stroke  ruined  his  mind.  There  is  small 
wonder  that  starting  power  and  staying  power  are 
two  things  and  that  many  lives  highly  gifted  with 
the  first  fail  for  lack  of  the  second. 

Here  is  the  life  story  of  a  humble  woman: 

“I  was  living  at  Sandy  Hook  when  I  met  Jacob 
Walker.  He  kept  the  Sandy  Hook  lighthouse.  He  took 
me  to  that  lighthouse  as  his  bride.  I  enjoyed  that,  for 
it  was  on  land,  and  I  could  keep  a  garden  and  raise 
vegetables  and  flowers. 

“After  a  few  years  my  husband  was  transferred  to 
Robbins  Reef.  The  day  we  came  here  I  said:  T  won’t 
stay.  The  sight  of  water  whichever  way  I  look  makes 
me  lonesome  and  blue.’  I  refused  to  unpack  my  trunks 
and  boxes  at  first,  I  unpacked  them  a  little  at  a  time. 
After  a  while  they  were  all  unpacked  and  I  stayed  on.  .  . . 

“My  husband  caught  a  heavy  cold  while  tending  the 
light.  It  turned  into  pneumonia.  It  was  necessary  to  . 
take  him  to  the  Smith  Infirmary  on  Staten  Island,  where 


THE  POWER  TO  SEE  IT  THROUGH  207 


he  could  have  better  care  than  I  could  give  him  in  the 
lighthouse. 

“I  could  not  leave  the  light  to  be  with  him.  He 
understood.  One  night,  while  I  sat  up  there  tending  the 
light,  I  saw  a  boat  coming.  Something  told  me  what 
news  it  was  bringing  me.  I  expected  the  words  that  came 
up  to  me  from  the  darkness. 

“  ‘We  are  sorry,  Mrs.  Walker,  but  your  husband’s 
worse.’ 

“  ‘He  is  dead,’  I  said. 

“We  buried  him  in  the  cemetery  on  the  hill.  Every 
morning  when  the  sun  comes  up  I  stand  at  the  port-hole 
and  look  in  the  direction  of  his  grave.  .  .  .  Sometimes 
the  hills  are  white  with  snow.  Sometimes  they  are  green. 
Sometimes  brown.  But  there  always  seems  to  come  a 
message  from  that  grave.  It  is  what  I  heard  Jacob  say 
more  often  than  anything  else  in  his  life.  Just  three 
words:  ‘Mind  the  light.’  ” 

Mrs.  Walker,  still  keeping  the  light,  was  seventy 
years  old  when  the  reporter  interviewed  her,  and 
her  husband  had  been  dead  thirty-two  years. 

Something  more  than  an  eager  getaway  is  needed 
for  such  living.  Such  living  requires  what  the  New 
Testament  calls  “patient  continuance,,”  Nobody 
ever  escapes  the  necessity  for  that.  Without  it  bit¬ 
terness,  hardness,  cynicism,  hopelessness  befall 
men’s  lives.  For  when  the  struggles  of  youthful 
adolescence  are  all  over  there  is  spiritual  ado¬ 
lescence  of  maturity.  We  all  have  to  deal  with  it 
if  we  are  to  see  life  through.  It  is  the  soul  enlar- 


208  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


ging  its  grasp  to  include  trouble  in  its  scheme  of 
life;  it  is  the  spirit,  like  a  ship,  moving  out  from 
the  waters  of  youth’s  inner  bay  and  steadying  down 
to  the  long  pull  of  the  open  sea. 

IV 

The  shame  of  a  good  beginning  spoiled  by  a  bad 
ending  is  emphasized  when  we  recall  the  many  lives 
that  have  reversed  the  process.  Consider  two  pic¬ 
tures.  The  first  is  a  provision  store  in  New  Orleans 
in  the  year  1857.  A  lad  fifteen  years  old  is  seeking 
employment  there.  He  has  been  brought  up  in  an 
English  workhouse,  has  run  away,  has  crossed  the 
sea  to  make  his  fortune.  His  fortune  begins  in  that 
provision  store  where  he  is  hired  because  he  is  able 
in  a  legible  hand  to  mark  the  coffee  sacks.  The 
second  picture  is  Westminster  Abbey  crowded  with 
a  distinguished  assembly  from  the  ends  of  the  earth. 
A  funeral  cortege  moves  down  the  nave.  It  pauses 
when  the  bier  is  opposite  the  tomb  of  David  Living¬ 
stone.  One  almost  thinks  that  the  dead  Livingstone 
himself  may  hear  the  singing  of  his  favorite  hymn, 

G  spread  Thy  covering  wings  around 

Till  all  our  wanderings  cease. 

They  are  honoring  Henry  M.  Stanley  with  a  funeral 
service  in  the  Abbey.  Those  two  scenes,  so  far 
apart,  belong  to  a  single  life.  -  His  name  was  not 


THE  POWER  TO  SEE  IT  THROUGH  209 

Stanley.  It  was  Rowlands  or  Rollants,  no  one 
knows  which.  Stanley  was  the  man  in  New  Orleans 
whose  name  the  boy  took  for  his  own.  Unpromis¬ 
ing  beginning  to  be  crowned  by  such  an  ending! 

Such  stories  are  the  romance  of  human  life. 
Many  a  man  is  like  a  well-pitched  ball  which  has 
started  with  such  apparent  lack  of  promise  that  the 
spectators  already  have  prepared  themselves  to  cry 
“Wild  ball,”  when  suddenly  it  straightens  itself 
out  and  crosses  the  center  of  the  plate. 

In  the  realm  of  character  this  power  of  recov¬ 
ery  is  one  of  the  central  messages  of  religion.  A 
book  like  Harold  Begbie’s  “Twice-Born  Men”  is  an 
inspiriting  record  of  folk  whose  lamentable  start  was 
redeemed  by  a  great  conclusion.  Fornicators, 
adulterers,  thieves,  covetous,  drunkards,  revelers, 
extortioners — such  is  the  New  Testament’s  descrip¬ 
tion  of  the  raw  material  out  of  which  many  of  the 
first  Christians  were  made.  And  from  that  day 
to  this,  making  Augustine  Bishop  of  Hippo  out  of 
Augustine  the  slave  of  lust,  or  Jerry  McAuley  the 
man  out  of  Jerry  McAuley  the  drunkard,  has  been 
one  of  the  Gospel’s  specialties. 

To  a  man  who  has  had  a  fine  start  and  now  faces 
the  possibility  of  a  miserable  ending,  there  is  a  stim¬ 
ulating  challenge  in  these  folk  who  reverse  the 
process,  who  started  by  being  pitchblende  and  ended 
by  being  radium. 


210  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 


V 

The  power  to  see  life  through  to  a  great  con¬ 
clusion  is  obviously  a  matter  of  patience,  and 
patience  is  of  all  virtues  one  of  the  most  difficult  to 
achieve.  Nothing  in  this  world,  however,  is  likely 
to  get  on  without  it,  for  the  world  itself  is  built  on 
patient  lines.  A  magician  will  thrill  his  audience 
by  planting  in  a  pot  of  earth  a  seed  which,  under 
the  waving  of  his  wand,  will  produce  in  a  moment 
a  fruit-laden  tree.  But  God  never  makes  trees  like 
that.  From  the  solar  nebulae  to  the  oak  that  shades 
our  lawn  is  a  long  story,  so  long  that  our  imagin¬ 
ations  weary  in  trying  to  measure  it. 

Man,  however,  likes  the  magician’s  way  better; 
he  is  naturally  impatient;  as  a  popular  song  puts 
it,  he  wants  what  he  wants  when  he  wants  it ;  and  in 
consequence  he  fails  to  carry  on  to  a  fine  finish. 

A  traveler  tells  us  that  sunrise  in  the  Tyrolese 
Alps  takes  four  hours  of  gradually  expanding  glory 
before  the  sun  is  fully  up,  but  the  traveler  also  says 
that  a  cinema  concern  has  taken  a  moving  picture 
of  the  sunrise  which  is  now  run  off  in  ninety  sec¬ 
onds  for  the  delectation  of  the  crowds.  We  like 
things  done  that  way;  we  wish  to  condense  and 
hasten  the  whole  process  of  the  universe ;  we  would 
cry,  “Step  lively,”  to  the  Eternal. 

By  this  attitude  we  often  unfit  ourselves  to  live. 


THE  POWER  TO  SEE  IT  THROUGH  211 

Just  now,  for  example,  many  folk  are  so  impatient 
over  the  failure  of  the  ideal  hopes  which  we  associ¬ 
ated  with  the  fighting  and  winning  of  the  war  that 
on  every  side  they  are  collapsing  into  cynicism. 
They  were  sure  that  the  millennium  would  be  none 
too  good  to  expect  as  the  gain  of  such  terrific  sacri¬ 
fice.  All  sorts  of  human  unities  and  brotherhoods 
were  to  come  in  the  wake  of  victory;  everybody  was 
to  get  together  with  everybody  else;  we  were  to 
have  pan-Christianity,  pan-Americanism,  pan- 
nationalism — and  what  we  have  is  pandemonium. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  we  had  no  right  to  expect  that 
war  could  cook  and  serve  us  such  delicious  dishes. 
War  always  has  done  exactly  the  opposite.  Dr. 
Washington  Gladden,  in  his  “Recollections,”  speak¬ 
ing  of  the  days  which  followed  the  Civil  War,  said, 

“No  nation  can  engage  in  a  protracted  war  without 
suffering  a  serious  loss  of  national  probity  and  honor. 
The  worst  losses  are  outside  of  the  army  and  after  the 
war  .  .  .  the  total  effect  of  war  upon  the  nation  is  dis¬ 
astrous;  inevitably  it  lowers  the  moral  tone;  it  scatters 
the  seeds  of  moral  pestilence;  it  results  in  just  such 
disorders  and  corruptions  as  those  which  disfigure  the 
pages  of  our  national  history  in  the  decade  following  the 
close  of  the  Civil  War.” 

It  is  not  only  bad  ethics,  therefore;  it  is  stupid 
to  fall  into  cynicism  because  the  Great  War  did  not 
save  the  world.  The  Great  War  almost  ruined  the 


212  TWELVE  TESTS  OF  CHARACTER 

world,  and  there  is  no  way  out  except  as  men  get 
their  second  wind  and  tackle  the  problem  of  war 
itself  and,  behind  that,  the  evils  which  cause  war. 
The  only  folk  who  are  fit  to  live  and  work  in  this 
world  are  folk  who  have  that  kind  of  undiscourage- 
able  patience. 

When  one  hears  Parsifal  he  sees  Klingsor’s  palace, 
the  citadel  of  evil,  collapse  in  a  twinkling  into  ruin. 
That  sudden  shattering  of  evil’s  stronghold  is  a 
triumph  of  stage  machinery,  but,  like  so  many  other 
things  upon  the  stage,  it  does  not  happen  in  real 
life.  In  real  life  great  gains  are  made  slowly. 

In  real  life  Nero  sits  on  the  throne  and  Paul 
languishes  in  prison,  and  many  years  must  pass 
before  people  begin  calling  their  dogs  Nero  and 
their  sons  Paul,  but  that  time  comes.  As  God  lives, 
that  time  will  always  come. 

For  the  kind  of  patience  which  can  carry  a  man 
through  to  a  great  finish  in  his  personal  life  and  in 
his  social  devotions  is  founded  on  religious  faith. 
That  this  universe  is  fundamentally  a  moral  order, 
that  there  are  reason  and  purpose  in  it,  that  what 
ought  to  be  done  can  be  done,  that,  as  Carlyle  cried, 
“No  lie  can  live  forever” — these  are  religious  con¬ 
victions  which  undergirdle  men  to  carry  on  when 
carrying  on  is  hard. 

As  for  personal  experience,  to  what  triumphant 
endings  has  religious  faith  brought  multitudes  who 


THE  POWER  TO  SEE  IT  THROUGH  213 

have  understood  its  power!  If  ever  any  one  had 
a  difficult  conclusion  to  face,  it  was  Jesus.  Yet  if  he 
had  given  up  in  Gethsemane,  unable  to  finish,  all 
his  teaching  would  have  been  forgotten,  his  works 
of  mercy  would  have  dropped  into  oblivion,  and  the 
life  divine  would  have  been  wasted.  His  victory 
lay  in  his  power  to  say  on  Calvary,  “It  is  finished.” 
If  ever  a  man  might  have  been  tempted  to  give  up, 
it  was  Paul.  Yet  if  in  Nero’s  prison  he  had  col¬ 
lapsed,  unable  to  finish,  all  his  fine  start  on  the 
Damascus  Road  would  have  gone  for  nothing  and 
his  long  and  arduous  labor  would  have  lost  its  fruit. 
The  significance  of  his  life  hung  on  his  ability  at 
last  to  say,  “I  have  finished  the  course,  I  have  kept 
the  faith.” 

Indeed,  through  the  power  of  vital  religion,  not 
simply  the  naturally  strong  and  well-equipped,  but 
the  unpromising  and  feeble  win  through  to  a  fine 
conclusion.  Bunyan  was  right  when,  bringing  his 
victorious  company  of  pilgrims  to  the  gates  of  the 
Celestial  City,  he  numbered  among  them,  not 
simply  Great-heart,  Valiant-for-truth,  Honest,  and 
Stand-fast,  but  also  Mr.  Feeble-mind,  Mr.  Ready- 
to-halt,  Mr.  Despondency,  and  his  daughter,  Much- 
afraid.  They,  too,  had  been  given  the  power  to  see 
it  through. 


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